Author: rebecca.kosick

Posted on by rebecca.kosick

Join Lyra Bristol Poetry for the UK’s first ever AI and Poetry symposium.

 

Date: Friday June 27th 2025
Venue: Watershed (W3)
Time: 10:00 – 14:00
Price: FREE (advance booking essential)

Book here

Lyra’s project ‘Page Against the Machine: AI and Poetry’, funded by Brigstow Institute, has been pairing public poets and technologists together to create new work responding to the research question: ‘How can poetic writing produced by, or with, AI accurately model human voice, narrative and place-based experience?’, exploring the ethical and creative dilemmas of our time.

This event will include presentations of research and poems from four poet/technologist pairs: Shakara and Vince Baidoo, Deanna Rodger and Michael Marcinkowski, Raina Greifer and Francesco Bentivegna, Ralph Hoyte and Matthew Olden, as well as the project’s lead researcher Caleb Parkin.

Everyone is welcome to attend this free event (advance booking essential) and to join the conversation around AI, poetry and creativity in a relaxed, fun and friendly environment.

Presented by Lyra Bristol Poetry, in partnership with Brigstow Institute.

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Awono

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The Bristol Poetry Institute is looking forward to Translated By, Bristol’s launch of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Awono, a unique anthology centring around 19 translations of Jean-Claude Awono’s poems “Le Poème de Yambacongo”.

The evening will feature a discussion with some of the featured translators in conversation with Madhu Krishnan, Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures at University of Bristol’s Department of English.

This event will take place at Gloucester Road Books, BS7 8NU. Doors open at 6:30pm for a 7pm start on Friday 16th of May.

Book your place here.

 

Latin American Poetry in Translation

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This week the Society for Latin American Studies conference will be taking place at Bristol. In conjunction with this conference, the Bristol Poetry Institute is pleased to co-host with Carlos Grigsby a pre-conference poetry reading at East Bristol Books in Old Market, which will be open to everyone. We’ll have poetry in Spanish, Portuguese and English.
East Bristol Books

12 West Street

Old Market

Bristol BS2 0BH

Join us on Wednesday 9 April for a Multilingual Poetry & Translation Evening at East Bristol Books (EBB), an independent bookshop that supports Latin American literature in translation, located in the Old Market area of the city. Bristol-based Chilean poet Andrés Anwandter, Brazilian poet Rosane Carneiro, US poet and scholar Rebecca Kosick, and British poet Dan Eltringham, all of whom are also translators, will be reading and discussing the craft of translating poetry at 6 pm. Entry is free and all are welcome. Refreshments will be provided.

01.4.2025 – Adalber Salas Hernández Launches New Poetry Collection

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Join the Caribbean Studies Studio for an evening of poetry, as Adalber Salas Hernández introduces his latest poetry collection, Isolario / Isolarium

Join us for an exciting evening discussing Adalber Salas’ dual-language poetry collection, Isolario/Islarium. Hosted by Bristol’s Caribbean Studies Studio and Bristol Poetry Institute, with the support of the University of Bristol’s Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies Department, this event will be a celebration of poetry.

Tickets are free and can be reserved here. (You will also have the option of advance ordering a copy of the book.)

Dante’s Purgatorio Today

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The Bristol Poetry Institute is pleased to join the Institute for Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition in hosting Professor Philip Terry (University of Essex) for an exciting event featuring readings and discussion of Dante’s Purgatorio.

Thu 6 Feb 2025 3:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Lecture Theatre 3, Woodland Road Complex, Arts Complex, Woodland Road, Clifton, Bristol, BS8 1TB
Access is via the main entrance at 7 Woodland Road.
Book your free ticket here

Professor Terry will read some cantos from his recent translation and updating of Dante’s Purgatorio, where the poet and his guide climb a mountain made out of Flexible Rock Substitute (FRS). Dante’s artists are replaced with contemporary artists and artists-in-residence including Grayson Perry, Rachel Whiteread, and Damien Hirst. On the final terrace the poet reaches Dante’s Paradise, here modelled on the Eden Project.

Philip will discuss the task of translation and translators’ approaches to Dante through the ages with a panel of Bristol academics from Italian, English, Classics, and Translation Studies. All welcome!

Ben Okri: Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading

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The Bristol Poetry Institute, in coordination with the Centre for Black Humanities at the University of Bristol, is delighted to announce that the 2024-2025 Annual Reading will be delivered by Sir Ben Okri. The event will consist of a one hour reading followed by a half -hour book signing. The event is free but booking is essential.

 

1 November
6pm
Great Hall, Wills Memorial Building

 

 

Ben Okri is the Nigerian-born poet, cultural activist, and author of thirteen novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road, the first in a trilogy, and Astonishing the Gods, which was selected as one of the BBC’s ‘100 novels that shaped our world’, as well as collections of poetry, short stories, plays and essays. His work has been translated into more than 27 languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won numerous international prizes. His poem following the Grenfell Tower tragedy was widely viewed on television and on social media. He was a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was awarded an OBE in 2001 and a Knighthood in 2023.

 
This event is brought to you with support from the Department of English and the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. For access requirements and queries, contact: poetry-institute@bristol.ac.uk.

Talking Translation with Katherine Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

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The Bristol Poetry Institute, in coordination with Bristol HiPLA and the Caribbean Studies Studio, is pleased to host Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and Katherine Hedeen for an interactive afternoon discussion of translation and poetry.

Talking Translation with Katherine Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

Thursday 31 October

3-4 PM

University of Bristol, Physics Building 3.27

Book your free place here

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over seventy collections of his poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards all over the Spanish-speaking region, including the Loewe Foundation Prize in 2015. His selected poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Serbian, Swedish, and Vietnamese. His work has developed an enthusiastic readership in the US and the UK, where he has published eight book-length translations, including thaw/deshielos (Arc, 2013), from a red barn (co im press, 2020) and rebel matter. poems 2002-20212 (Shearsman, 2022).

Katherine M. Hedeen is a prize-winning translator of poetry and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region into English, including Jorge Enrique Adoum, Antonio Gamoneda, Fina García Marruz and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. She is the co-editor, with Welsh poet Zoë Skoulding, of the groundbreaking transatlantic translation anthology, Poetry’s Geographies (Shearsman, 2022).

Later the same evening, please join us for a reading and launch of their new book, despegue/departure at East Bristol Books.

 

Lunch Poems

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Join the Bristol Poetry Institute to celebrate the 60th anniversary of US poet Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, purportedly written during the poet’s lunch break from his job at the Museum of Modern Art. We will gather together to read the book aloud over our own sack lunches. All welcome!

Lunch with Lunch Poems

Thursday 9 May

1-2 PM

Royal Fort Gardens (near the mirrors), Bristol BS8 1UH

Rain location: PHYS BLDG 3.34

 

April events in collaboration with the Bristol Poetry Institute

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Caribbean Nights: Poetry

Date: Thursday 18th April
Venue: Watershed (Cinema 3)
Time: 20:00- 22:00 (please note: this was previously listed as a 19:30 start)

Tickets: £8.50/5
Come and watch Caribbean Nights: Poetry which, even now, feels fresh in its insights. Afterwards, poet and editor Rishi Dastidar, 2023 TS Eliot Prize winner Anthony Joseph and Louisa Adjoa Parker will talk to noted Bristol academic Madhu Krishnan about the vital need for diverse poetry in our everyday lives, before Helen Thomas reads a new poem inspired by the film.

Book Launch: Secret Poetics (no event link, just turn up)

Date: Thursday 18th April
Venue: Old Council Chamber, Wills Memorial Building
Time: 18:00-19:00
Rebecca Kosick will be reading from and talking about her new book, Secret Poetics. The first English-language translation of the “secret” poetry of Hélio Oiticica uncovers a crucial chapter in the development of one of Brazil’s most significant twentieth-century artists.

Page Against the Machine: Poetry and AI

Date: Saturday 20th April
Venue: Watershed (W3)
Time: 16:30 – 17:30pm
Tickets: Free
Come along to this fascinating and interactive panel and performance at Watershed to confront the key ethical, creative and human dilemmas of the future of poetry and art with the development of AI. A collaboration with the Brigstow Institute.

Announcing the 2023-2024 Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading

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We are delighted to announce that this year’s Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading by Don Paterson will take place on 7 February 2024 at 6PM in the Wills Memorial Building Great Hall. 

Book your free ticket here.

The Bristol Poetry Institute, with the support of the Department of English and the School of Modern Languages, are very pleased to present Don Paterson as this year’s annual reader. The event will last one hour and comprise of a poetry reading. A 30-minute book signing with the poet will follow the reading.

Don Paterson is the author of numerous works of poetry and non-fiction; his writing has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes, and the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009; he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and for many years taught at the University of St Andrews, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Poetry in the School of English. From 1997 to 2022, Paterson was poetry editor at Picador. For most of his life he has also worked as a jazz musician and composer. He lives in Kirriemuir, Scotland.