Making Literature Travel

This weekend we will be heading off to Tŷ Newydd Llanystumdwy for a workshop, organised in partnership with Literature Wales and with support from the Arts Council of Wales, which will bring together three female poets who write in different European languages and three Welsh-language poets.

The participants will explore each other’s poetry and the different contexts in which they write through discussion and translation into Dutch, Greek, Basque and Welsh with English as the bridge language. LAF organised its first poetry translation workshop in 2002, establishing a model that was adopted by its partners across Europe and beyond with over 100 workshops taking place since then. The collaborative, multilateral model encourages exploration of the participants’ work and poetics through in-depth discussion and individual translation into their respective languages. More information can be found here

The invited participants are Astrid Alben (Netherlands), Niki Chalkiadaki (Greece) and Beatriz Chivite Ezkieta (Basque Country) who will be joined by Welsh poets Elinor Wyn Reynolds, Mari George, and Marged Tudur.

Astrid Alben is a poet, editor and translator. She is the author of Ai! Ai! Pianissimo (2011), Plainspeak (2019) and Little Dead Rabbit (2022), which Alben self-translated into Dutch and which was published in Belgium by PoëzieCentrum (2021). Her translation of Anne Vegter’s Island glacier mountain won an English PEN Translates Award in 2022. Her translation of F. Van Dixhoorn’s The Complete Works is published by Broken Sleep Books in 2024. Her non-fiction has appeared in literary journals including Granta and the Times Literary Supplement. She has worked with BBC Radio and Wellcome Collection, and with performance and animation. Alben is the commissioning editor for literature in translation at Prototype Publishing.

Beatriz Chivite Ezkieta was born in Pamplona in 1991 and has lived in China, Nepal, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Italy, Taiwan and the United Kingdom where she studied Chinese language and comparative cultural studies. She began to write poetry in Basque to feel closer to her roots and maintain an intimacy with the words of her childhood. The themes of her poetry are cities and urban loneliness and the critical contemporary issues of our times. She has published five books of poetry in Basque, including Metro (2014), published in English as The Blue Line (Francis Boutle, 2022). Her latest is Zeozer Gaizki Doa (Something Goes Wrong), published in 2022. She is the recipient of numerous prizes in both the Basque Country and in the UK. Her poetry has been translated to Spanish, Galician, English, Frisian, Gaelic, Slovenian, Italian and Indonesian.

Niki Chalkiadaki’s family comes from Crete and she was born in Trikala in 1980. She holds a degree in Greek Literature and Linguistics from Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Western Macedonia. In 2013 at the National Symposium of Patra in Greece she was awarded the first prize for Best Poetry Book by a new poet for her first poetry collection Ανάσκελη με πυρετό (On my back with fever, 2012) and she was short-listed for the Greek National Awards in Poetry at the same year. The poetry collection Μικρές κανίβαλες (Little she-cannibals, 2022) is her third poetry book. Her poems have been published in literary magazines and have been translated into English, German and French. She has lived in Scotland for the past ten years.

Elinor Wyn Reynolds is a poet, author and editor. She was born in Treorchy, in the Rhondda Valley, and grew up in Carmarthen, west Wales. She was educated at University of Wales, Aberystwyth and Jesus College Oxford. Having lived in (almost) every corner of Wales, she is, once again, living in Carmarthen with her family. Her first novel, Gwirionedd, was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2020, and her latest poetry collection, Anwyddoldeb, won the Wales Book of the Year 2023 Poetry Award.

Mari George is a poet, writer and translator living in Bridgend. She has published two volumes of poems – Y Nos yn Dal yn fy Ngwallt (The Night Still in my Hair) (2004),  Siarad Siafins (Smalltalking) (2014) and a booklet – Rhaff (Rope) (2024)- and is a member of the ‘Aberhafren’ team in the BBC Radio Cymru Talwrn poetry competition series. She has also edited several collections of poetry and written and adapted a number of books for children. Sut i Ddofi Corryn (How to Tame a Spider) is her debut novel for adults which won the main Wales Book of the Year award in 2024.

Marged Tudur is a poet, writer, lecturer and editor from Morfa Nefyn and now lives in Caernarfon. She graduated in Welsh at Aberystwyth University, studied an MA in Creative Writing, and was awarded a PhD for her study on reading lyrics form Welsh pop songs from the last fifty years as literature. She is a member of the ‘Dros yr Aber’ Talwrn team. She is one of the editors of Rhywbeth i’w Ddweud (‘Something to Say’, Cyhoeddiadau Barddas, 2017), a volume by various contributors that looks at the power of words by exploring influential political Welsh songs. In 2020 she published her first volume of poetry, Mynd (‘Going’, Gwasg Carreg Gwalch), which discusses the experience of losing her brother. The volume won the 2021 Book of the Year Poetry Award.