Making Literature Travel

A UK-Vietnam Transnational Poetry and Sound Project

Rising and Sinking Like Mountains in Streams brings together poets and artists from Vietnam and the UK in a new collaborative project connecting two vital river ecosystems: the Red River in Hanoi, Vietnam and the River Wye in Wales. They will create experimental poetic works through visual scores, graphic notation, and deep listening to the ecological and cultural rhythms of these rivers.

This project is supported by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture programme, which nurtures fresh cultural partnerships between the UK and select countries in Asia Pacific and Europe, with a focus on diversity and inclusion and addressing climate change.

The Project

This site-specific initiative explores rivers as living systems—places of memory, biodiversity, and poetic meaning. Through collective writing, ecological observation, and participatory co-creation, the project will gather field recordings, local stories, and community responses across a series of online and in-person residencies throughout 2026. The project takes its name from a line by Hồ Xuân Hương (1772–1822), celebrated as “The Queen of Nôm Poetry.” Her verse—known for its wit, sensuality, and celebration of nature’s power—provides a fitting touchstone for this exploration of rivers, resilience, and creative force.

The core artistic team includes Hanoi-based writer, translator, publisher, and literary organiser Nhã Thuyên and MontenegroFisher  (Luna Montenegro & Adrian Fisher), a UK-based artist-poet duo working across poetry, sound, and performance, exploring ecological poetics and the entanglement of human and non-human life

They will collaborate locally with four emerging artists—two from Vietnam and two from Wales— fostering cross-cultural exchange and lasting relationships between creative practitioners.

From Vietnam:
Nguyen Huu Hai Duy started his artistic practice through observation, spending his time wandering, taking note, and archiving into his mind the frivolous and incomprehensible phenomenon.
Thùy Dương  lives and works in Hà Nội. She practises writing in order to examine herself and to pray.

From Wales:
Wanda O’Connor is a Lecturer in Creative Writing and co-editor of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. Her writing explores innovative poetry, ecopoetry, and women’s poetry, appearing in publications including The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900.

Lowri Hedd Vaughan is a Welsh language interdisciplinary creative whose work moves between poetry, prose, site-responsive practice, and social art. Flowing through hydrofeminist inquiry and elevated by animist spirituality, her practice holds water, land, community and ancestors as collaborators. A member of Literature Wales’s Representing Wales 2025-26 cohort, she facilitates community climate action and bioregional regeneration.

Project Timeline

The project unfolds across several phases with online research having already begun. Collaborative workshops will bring together the international team to develop methodologies and begin creating visual scores inspired by the two rivers.

In April the UK artists will travel to Hanoi for an intensive residency including field research along the Red River, collaborative workshops with Vietnamese emerging artists, skills development sessions with students and early-career poets, and a public performance at a Hanoi arts venue.

In May Vietnamese artist Nhã Thuyên joins the UK team for fieldwork along the River Wye. The residency includes encounters with river activists and advocates (including River Action UK, the “Wild Women of Wye,” and Save the Wye campaign), workshops with local communities, and public performances at two major Welsh cultural events—the Hay Festival and Aberystwyth Poetry Festival.

The project culminates in September with a hybrid event in London and the launch of a trilingual (English, Welsh, Vietnamese) digital publication featuring the new work and process documentation. All performances will be recorded and made freely available online.

Rivers as Sites of Transformation

The River Wye—one of the UK’s most beautiful yet threatened waterways—and the Red River in Vietnam both carry rich histories of human settlement, cultural memory, and ecological change. Both face contemporary pressures from climate change, pollution, and shifting land use.

By placing these rivers in dialogue, the project invites new ways of listening, performing, and imagining waterways as sites of shared transformation. Through experimental notation and collaborative practice, it offers inclusive, improvisational frameworks for interpreting landscape, language, and sound.

This aligns with the British Council’s Connections Through Culture priorities: building capacity and awareness of sustainable practices in the arts and culture sector, raising awareness of climate change and biodiversity loss, and advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Open Call

An open call for two emerging Welsh artistswas held to select the artists, a copy of which can be found below

Open Call_ENGLISH

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Community Engagement

Throughout the project, the team will lead community workshops and skills development sessions for aspiring artists and students in both countries. These sessions are designed to share methodologies, encourage horizontal learning, and invite local participants to shape the creative outcomes.

The project privileges shared process over product, ensuring mutual growth, cross-cultural understanding, and collective investment in ecological and artistic futures—fostering dialogue that challenges ideas, inspires communities, and pushes artistic boundaries.

About Connections Through Culture

The British Council’s Connections Through Culture Grants support artistic collaboration between the UK and 19 countries across Asia-Pacific and Europe. The programme builds lasting partnerships through innovative cross-cultural projects that promote the exchange of skills, knowledge, and practice. In 2024, the programme awarded over £741,000 across 11 countries in the Asia Pacific region, supporting 84 collaborations exploring themes of diversity, inclusion, and climate action.

Support

Rising and Sinking Like Mountains in Streams received a grant of £10,000 from the British Council’s Connections Through Culture programme 2025/26.

For more information about the project or the upcoming open call, please contact: info@lit-across-frontiers.org