Join us to welcome in Poetry Spring on Saturday 30 April at St John's College, an afternoon of poetry workshops, discussions and readings with British and international poets. All the events are free but places must be booked fia Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/air-raid-discussion-and-reading-tickets-313257590887?aff=ebdsoporgprofile
Poetry Spring is organised by Mina Gorji (Pembroke College) and Sasha Dugdale (St John's College) and is funded by St John's College and a grant from the Judith E Wilson Fund.
The Siege of Leningrad began in 1941 and lasted 872 days, resulting in the most destructive blockade in history. Air Raid (Ugly Duckling, 2021) takes us through the archives of memory and literature in this city of death. Polina Barskova’s polyphonic poems stretch the boundaries of poetic form - this is what we’re left with after poetry's failure to save nations and people: post-death, post-Holocaust, post-Siege, post-revolution; post-marriage and post-literature. How does language react to such a catastrophe? And how does translation convey that catastrophe into a new language?
Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), named one of the best poetry books of 2020 by The New York Times and The NPR, and the winner of the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
Sasha Dugdale is the writer-in-residence at St John's College. Her fifth collection Deformations (Carcanet, 2021) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and her translation of Maria Stepanova's In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
