What’s On

The Bristol Poetry Institute, in collaboration with the Instituto Ramón Llull and the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, are pleased to invite you to a showcase of recent Catalan poetry. This one-hour event will feature bilingual readings with English translations, of four Catalan poets.

Mon, 24 April 2023, 18:00 – 21:00 BST

Wills Memorial Building

1.11 Old Council Chamber

Queens Rd Bristol BS8 1RL

Book your free place here

About the poets 

Míriam Cano is a journalist, writer and translator. A lecturer and director at the Bloom School where she gives seminars on Poetic Reading and Creation, she also works with several Catalan cultural media outlets as a columnist and literary journalist. Notable in her career as a writer are several collections of poems, among them Buntsandstein (Red Sandstone, Viena, 2013), winner of the 2012 Martí Dot prize, Ancoratge (Anchorage, Terrícola, 2016), and Vermell de Rússia (Russian Red, laBreu Edicions, 2020). She also wrote the short story “La Comuna de París” (The Paris Commune) in the jointly authored volume Cremen Cels (Burning Skies, laBreu Edicions, 2017), a project in collaboration with Martí Sales and Antònia Vicens. As a translator she has rendered into Catalan works by authors including Emily Dickinson, Albert Camus, Sandra Cisneros, Maggie Nelson, Lauren Groff, Martha Nussbaum, Joana Russ and John Ashbery. She is also the coeditor of the magazine Carn de Cap.

Jaume C. Pons Alorda (Caimari, Mallorca, 1984) holds a bachelor’s degree in English Philology and a masters in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature and Cultural Management from the University of the Balearic Islands. He is an award-winning writer, translator, publisher, and creative writing teacher. He in the author of multiple poetry collections, including the trilogy Tots els sepuclres (2015), as well as Cala foc als ossos (2016), Era (2018), Riu, bèstia (2023) and Mil súmmums (2022), among others. He has also published prose works, such as Faula (2012) and Ciutat de Mal (2019). Pons Alorda has translated Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth , and Elizabeth Bishop into Catalan, and he is currently working on translations of Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Iris Murdoch, Edgar Allan Poe and William Blake. He is currently editor of the Artificium and Debiaix series for the publishing house, Lleonard Muntaner. Additionally, he writes articles in the press (Ara Balears, Lletres Bàrbares, El Temps) and participates in the podcast L’illa de Maians at the Ona Llibres bookshop in Barcelona.

Xavier Mas Craviotto (Navàs, 1996) studied Catalan Philology and a postgraduate program in Language Consultancy and Publishing Services at the University of Barcelona. For two years, he worked at the Research Centre for Sociolinguistics and Communication (CUSC-UB). He is currently a lecturer at the University of Bristol, where he teaches Cataln language and culture, and also works as a proofreader for Catalan publishing houses. He is one of the cofounders of “Com ho diria”, a digital platform that specializes in slang used by young Catalan speakers. He is also an award-winning author of poetry and prose fiction. At the age of 17, he was a finalist in the Jordi Sierra i Fabra Literary Prize of Spain and Latin America and, since then, he has won more than twenty narrative and poetry awards. His first novel, La mort lenta (2019) won the Documenta Prize, and he has recently published his second novel, La pell del món (2023). He has also published three poetry collections: Renills de cavall negre (2019), which won the Salvador Iborra prize, La gran nàusea (2021) and La llum subterrània (2023), which was awarded the Ausiàs March prize. His short stories have been included in collaborative anthologies and he has participated in many poetry readings and panel discussions about language and literature.

Eduard Escoffet (Barcelona, 1979) is a poet and visual/sound artist. He has worked across many styles of poetry (visual and written poetry, installations, oral poetry, poetic action), but principally is principally invested in sound poetry and poetry performance. He has performed in poetry festivals and events across Europe, China, the United States, South Africa, and many countries in Latin America. Starting from an exploration of the body, the voice and the text, his poetry expands into territories such as politics, sex and architecture, with special attention to their political meaning. He has presented his work in venues and festivals all over the world, and has created sound and audiovisual pieces for several institutions and festivals. He has published the poetry collections Gaire (2012), El terra i el cel (2013), and Menys i tot (2017) in Catalan; the artist’s book Estramps (2021) with the artist Evru; as well as prints of his visual and graphic poetry. Escoffet has also released two records with the electronic music group Bradien: Pols (2012) and Escala (2015). He is now member of the band Barba Corsini (www.barbacorsini.net). http://propost.org/escoffet. Videos: http://youtube.com/txtstate. Sound: http://soundcloud.com/txtstate

We are delighted to announce that this year’s Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading by Denise Riley has been rescheduled and will take place on 21 April 2023 at 6PM in the Wills Memorial Building Great Hall. 

Book your free ticket here.

Over the last five decades, Denise Riley has steadily acquired the reputation of being, in the words of Simon Armitage, ‘one of the best poets around’. Sarah Perry, writer of The Essex Serepent, and Max Porter, writer of Grief is a Thing With Feathers, each called her 2016 volume, Say Something Back ‘the best thing I’ve read in ages’, while Robert Macfarlane declared the book’s ‘heart-piercing elegy to her son Jacob, “A Part Song”: the most powerful contemporary poem I’ve read in years’. 2022 sees the much anticipated publication of its successor, Lurex. The evening promises to be enjoyable, thought provoking and moving.

This spring, the BPI returns with another series of short Zoom readings. Take a poetry break with us Tuesday evenings and enjoy an opportunity to hear Tjawangwa Dema, Nathaniel Farrell, and William Thompson share their recent work.

6pm BST Tues May 3      Tjawangwa Dema

6pm BST Tues May 10    Nathaniel Farrell

6pm BST Tues May 17    William Thompson

Register in advance for these events via Zoom. Free and open to all.

Our Readers

Tjawangwa Dema is author of The Careless Seamstress, winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Her chapbook Mandible was published as part of the New-Generation African Poets box set. She has received fellowships and residencies from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Northwestern University’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Danish International Visiting Artist program, amongst others. Tjawangwa has given readings/facilitated workshops in over twenty countries and her poetry and essays on poetic pedagogies have been featured in various publications, most recently New Daughters of Africa, Botswana Women Write and the MLA’s Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media. Tjawangwa sits on a number of poetry festival and institute boards and is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol. Her poetry has been translated into several languages. In addition to two book translations, her collection, an/other pastoral, was published by No Bindings in April 2022. Photo credit Petra Rolinec.

Born and raised in Western Pennsylvania, Nathaniel Farrell is a poet, collage artist, and educator. His first two books of poetry — Newcomer (2014) and Lost Horizon (2019) — are published by Ugly Duckling Presse. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Columbia University, where he studied Modernist American poetry, and currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri where he teaches composition at Washington University. His collages have been included in exhibitions in New York and Missouri and, like his poetry, engage problems of American national identity, including settler colonial fantasies, consumer culture, and environmental degradation.

William Thompson is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. Born in Cambridgeshire in 1991, his work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Wild Court, The Honest Ulsterman, One Hand Clapping, Ink Sweat & Tears and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-21 (Eyewear).