Events - Festival 2021

While poems can still cross borders and travel, the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that most poets cannot. Like everyone else, poets around the world have had to spend most of their time at home. The excellent WindowSwap website, recognising how much we miss the chance of different views and different perspectives, encourages people to upload short videos from their own windows onto their website and so whenever you get weary of the view from your own window, another view is just a click away. 

Inspired by this, we invited a range of poets from the UK and elsewhere to swap photographs taken from their own window, and to write poems responding to the photograph they have been sent.

The poems and photographs can be viewed via this page from 6 March. A selection will also be published in the Spring 2020 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation.

The poets taking part are:

Laila Sumpton (London) paired with Ukrainian poet Kateryna Babkina (Vienna), translated by Uilleam Blacker;

Scottish/Nepalese poet Nabin Chhetri (Aberdeen) paired with Georgian poet Bela Checkurishvili (Berlin), translated by Adham Smart;

Lithuanian poet Indrė Valantinaitė (Vilnius), translated by Rimas Uzgiris and paired with Theophilis Kwek (Singapore);

Jennifer Wong from Hong Kong, now based in the UK, paired with German poet Özlem Özgül Dündar​​​​​​, translated by Rebecca DeWald;

Dutch poet Astrid Alben, who moves between London and Amsterdam, paired with Agnes Agboton, a poet writing in Spanish and Gun and translated by Lawrence Schimel;

Kartanya Maynard, a Tasmanian First Nations poet paired with Gaelic poet Robbie MacLeòid.

In association with WindowSwap, Modern Poetry in Translation, Ten Days on the Island (Tasmania) and Book Arsenal Kyiv, with support from the European Cultural Foundation