It’s World Poetry Day! As an organisation dedicated to championing poetry and words in all their forms, we’re celebrating the power of poetry to travel across borders, languages and lived experiences, connecting voices and audiences across the globe.
Looking ahead, we’re excited to announce that we’ll be expanding our online international programme. As well as continuing our popular workshops which have featured poets from around the world, including most recently Naomi Shihab Nye, we’re delighted to be launching a series of conversations between international poets and their English-language translators. This will give our audiences the chance to hear contemporary international poetry in the original language, as well as to be a fly on the wall for the conversations which take place between poet and translator – from exploring the overall world of the poetry to getting into the nitty gritty of how and what to translate.
Our first pairing will be Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun alongside his translator Catherine Cobham, who’ll be joining us virtually at the end of April. We’ll share more details next week so watch this space.
Photo: Ghayath Almadhoun credit Sina Opalka
Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet born in Damascus in 1979, and who moved to Sweden in 2008. He has published five volumes of Arabic poetry, with his latest, I Brought You a Severed Hand, released in 2024. His poetry has been translated into nearly 30 languages. Almadhoun has also created several poetry films and curated numerous events, readings, and literary anthologies. He has collaborated extensively with scholars and artists. His poems have been included in projects by U.S. artist Jenny Holzer and German musician Blixa Bargeld, among others. In 2025, his new book, I Have Brought You a Severed Hand, translated by Catherine Cobham, was published simultaneously in English translation by Action Books in the U.S. and Divided Publishing in London and Brussels. Almadhoun currently divides his time between Berlin and Stockholm.
Catherine Cobham taught Arabic language and literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, for many years and was head of the department of Arabic and Persian from 2011 until 2021. She has translated the work of a number of Arab writers, including poetry by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghayath Almadhoun, Tammam Hunaidy and Nouri al-Jarrah, and novels and short stories by Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan al-Shaykh, Fuad al-Takarli and Jamal Saeed.
Catherine has written articles in academic journals and co-written with Fabio Caiani The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Her translation of a collection of poems by Abd al-Karim al-Ahmad is currently being considered for publication and she is translating a collection of stories by Muhammad Khudayyir.
It’s World Poetry Day! And we’re expanding our international programme
