Making Literature Travel

Bethany Handley is an award-winning writer, poet and disability activist. Her work explores nature and disability, challenging the barriers Disabled people experience, and has been published in POETRY, Poetry Wales, Spelt, The Welsh Agenda, Plantlife, and Country Living, and featured by BBC Radio 4 and BBC Wales, amongst others. Bethany was one of the writers on Literature Wales’ Representing Wales 2023-4, she was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2024, and she was awarded Creative Future’s Gold Prize for Creative Non-fiction 2023.  She was invited to read alongside Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and poet Owen Sheers on the Laureate’s Library Tour 2024. Bethany is currently co-editing a bilingual anthology of Welsh Deaf and Disabled writers. Her debut poetry pamphlet explores being a young Disabled woman in a crossfire of ableism and will be published by Seren in February 2025.

Emyr Wallace Humphreys translates from Welsh and Portuguese to English, and from English to Welsh. A graduate of the MA programme in Translation Studies at University College London, he has had literary translations published in journals such as The White Review, the New Welsh Review and Joyland Magazine, and has collaborated with Parthian Books, HarperCollins and UCL Press as a literary translator. He won a bursary for the 2022 Bristol Translates Literary Translation Summer School and was the first Celtic-language translator to be awarded the 2022-23 Visible Communities Mentorship, part of the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorship programme. He is a two-time nominee for Deep Vellum’s Best Literary Translations Anthology. His translation of Owain Owain’s futuristic Welsh novel Y Dydd Olaf will be published in June 2024 as The Last Day (Parthian Press). He works as a Welsh translator for Coleg Gwent and as a volunteer Welsh translator for the Centre for Alternative Technology and Mid & North Powys Mind. He lives in Wales, dividing his time between rural Powys and Aberystwyth.

Steffan Philips (1987) is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and facilitator from Wales. He holds a BA in Theatre, Music and Media and an MA in Welsh and Celtic Studies. He is currently studying for a PhD at Aberystwyth University exploring poetry films and is also involved in several theatre projects. He recently produced a zine in collaboration with artist Elin Angharad. He is spending two weeks in Prague as poet in residence with the European programme Ulysses Shelter where he will be putting finishing touches to his first poetry publication.

Selected for this round of the project by our EU-based sister organisation Culture Reset are Klára Krásenská who will join us in Caernarfon in May 2025 and Ondřej Lipár who will travel to Greece in August 2024.

Klára Krásenská (*1995) studied historical sciences at Catholic Theological Faculty and Czech studies at Faculty of Arts (Charles University) and she is currently studying comparative literature there. She works as a book editor, writes critical texts about literature and occasionally translates. Her own texts have so far been published in Tvar, Prostor Zlín or Psí víno. She is a co-author of the book Teorém kamenné zahrady (Theorem of the Stone Garden; UMPRUM, 2023). Her debut poetry collection Mýtinami (Through the Clearings; Viriditas, 2023) was included in the 2024 Magnesia Litera annual book awards longlist for poetry and also nominated in the DILIA Debut of the Year category.

Ondřej Lipár is a poet, journalist, and photographer. He has published three books of poetry: Skořápky (Nutshells, 2004), Komponent (Component, 2014), and Retro (2023). For more than a decade, he has been cooperating with the respected publisher Éditions Fra. Since 2020, together with Barbora Votavová, he has been producing Do slov, a literary podcast. He was a chairman of the Czech Writers’ Association and currently works as the Managing Editor of Vogue CS.

We would like to thank all the applicants for their time and wish all selected writers the best with their residencies.

Ulysses Shelter is co-financed by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and in Wales it is supported by the Arts Council of Wales and University of Wales Trinity Saint David.