Fill 2018: Wretched Strangers

(This is a past event and is no longer running)

An exclusive poetry performance featuring authors from Wretched Strangers, a poetry anthology that marks the contribution of innovative foreign-born writers to the UK’s poetry culture. Published to commemorate the anniversary of the 2016 EU Referendum, Wretched Strangers documents the challenges faced by writers from elsewhere, while offering hopeful re-conceptions of “shared foreignness”. Proceeds from the book are donated to charities fighting for the rights of refugees. The performance will be followed with a Q&A.

Caroline Bergvall is a French-Norwegian poet who has lived in England since 1989. Crossing languages, media, and art forms, her work takes the form of published poetry, performance, sound-driven projects, and has been commissioned and shown by such institutions as MoMA, Tate Modern, and the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Antwerp.

Giovanna Coppola is an Italian-American poet and writer. After living in London for 10 years, she recently moved to Naples, Italy. Her poems and essays have been published in Crab Fat Magazine, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Journal 69, JSTOR Daily, and Zeno Press.

Livia Franchini is a London-based writer and translator.  Her selected publications include The Quietus, 3:AM, Hotel, PEN Transmissions and The White Review. She has translated Michael Donaghy, Natalia Ginzburg, Sam Riviere and Jack Underwood among others. She has also performed internationally, most notably at Faber Social, Lowlands and Hay Festival Segovia.

Ariadne Radi Cor is an Anglo-Italian poet, collage maker and coffee spoon collector, published in Stories of Change, Cordite 47.0, HVTH 3.2, and Knives Forks and Spoons Press (forthcoming, 2019). Her video poems, recordings and postcards can be found on www.chantillycream.co.uk

George Szirtes, originally from Hungary, has lived in the UK since coming to the country as a refugee at the age of eight. He has won several awards for his work as a translator from Hungarian into English, including the European Poetry Translation Prize. As a poet, he was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize for his book Reel (2004). His poetry has been translated into numerous languages and widely anthologized.

Jane Yeh’s first collection of poems, Marabou, was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Forward, and Aldeburgh poetry prizes. She was named a Next Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society for her second collection, The Ninjas. Her third collection published by Carcanet, Discipline, will be published in 2019.

Chair
Maddalena Vatti is a freelance writer and editor at Croco Magazine.