7pm, Judith E Wilson Drama Studio, Faculty of English
A special evening of poetry in translation with local, UK-based writers, and visiting German poet Ulrike Almut Sandig.
Ulrike Almut Sandig was born in Großenhain (GDR) in 1979 and now lives with her family in Berlin. She started publishing her poetry by pasting poems onto lamp posts in Leipzig and spreading them on flyers and free post cards. After completing her Magister in Religious Studies and Modern Indology, she subsequently graduated from the German Creative Writing Program Leipzig. Two prose books and four volumes of her poetry have been published to date. Previous publications include radio plays and audio-books of poetry and pop music. For her poetry clips and spoken word performances she works with various composers and musical artists. Ulrike Almut Sandig has been invited to many international literary festivals and exchanges, been granted literary residencies in Helsinki, Wellington, Delhi, Mumbai and Sydney, her fiction and poetry has been widely anthologized. In spring 2015 she was Writer in Residence at the University of Nottingham. In 2015 Ugly Duckling Press (Brooklyn, USA) launched a selection of her early poems in Bradley Schmidt’s translation. Karen Leeder’s translations of Sandig’s Thick of it (Dickicht, 2011) will appear with Seagull press in 2018.
Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and academic, and teaches German at New College, Oxford. She also translates contemporary German literature into English, especially poetry: most recently Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems, with David Constantine, and Michael Krüger, Last Day of the Year: Selected Poems (both 2014). Her translation of Evelyn Schlag’s Selected Poems (2004) won the Schlegel Tieck Prize in 2005 and she won the Stephen Spender Prize in 2013 for her translations of Durs Grünbein. She was awarded an English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translations from Ulrike Almut Sandig’s Dickicht in 2016.
Luke McMullan is a writer from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He lives in New York and Cambridge, UK. He is the editor of New York Stock and was curator of the unAmerican Activities reading series and the Segue reading series. His work has recently been published in Datableed, Cordite Poetry Review, and Asymptote. He just finished a long poem, called The Ruin, a creative translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem of the same title.
Sophie Seita works with language on the page, in performance, and in translation. She’s recently presented My Little Enlightenment Plays, a project that bridges experimental performance, translation, research, and installation, at La MaMa Galleria in New York and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her translations of the German poet Uljana Wolf received a 2015 PEN/Heim Award, have been published widely, and will appear this summer as a full-length collection, titled Subsisters: Selected Poems (Brooklyn: Belladonna*, 2017). She’s also a Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge, writing about avant-garde communities and little magazines.
Peter Hughes is the current Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University and a Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Magdalene College. He is the founding editor of Oystercatcher Press. His responses to Petrarch’s sonnets, Quite Frankly, came out from Reality Street in 2015. His ‘Cavalcanty’ project has just been published by Carcanet.
Ian Patterson is the translator of Fourier and Proust, and of poems by R.M. Rilke, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Reverdy, Pierre Alferi, Marcel Benabou, Yves Bichet, Dominique Grandmont, Jacques Roubaud and others. His most recent books are Time Dust (Equipage , 2015) and Still Life (Oystercatcher, 2015). Equipage will shortly publish a new collection, Bound To Be. He teaches English at Queens’ College, Cambridge.