Every year, Read My World organizes a Poetry Translation Workshop during which participants, who are not required to know the source language, explore the language, the themes, the stories and the emotions expressed in the writing of a poet. The act of translation becomes our starting point to discuss these topics, and to write our own poetry.

This year, Arab Palestinian writer, cultural journalist, and blogger Rasha Hilwi, will lead this workshop as she takes you on an exploration of Jay Bernard’s poetry book Surge, an archive of black radical British history explored against the backdrop of the Grenfell and Windrush scandals. Bernard is a poet based in London, and their work is interdisciplinary, critical, queer and rooted in the archive. Rasha will select a few poems to read and attempt to translate together into our own languages. What matters in this workshop is the process and the discussion that will occur, and more importantly, we will use poetry, language and the process of translation to make links between the different realities we all come from and exist in.

There is no prerequisite to participate to this workshop except for knowledge of English, ideally you will be multilingual, but if you are not, you can also work in English and use the process of translation to do your own writing in English.

This workshop will be in English. Every participant will have the opportunity to translate from English into their own languages.