Team

Nariman Youssef is a literary translator and cultural worker with expertise in the arts & heritage sector in Egypt and the UK. During nine years at the British Library, she led a bilingual editorial team and created the library’s first in-house translation operation. As well as being a long-time collaborator of the Poetry Translation Centre, Nariman has facilitated workshops with the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT), Shadow Heroes, Shubbak Festival and Africa Writes. She has recently completed a residency at the BCLT with a focus on multilingualism as a creative prism.

What I do:

As Director, I’m responsible for running and leading the charity, reporting to our board of trustees, liaising with funders and supporters, and developing partnerships to keep the PTC flourishing well into the future. If you are interested to work with us, book us for an event, or be part of our story by becoming a PTC supporter, please feel free to email me!

You can contact Nariman at nariman@poetrytranslation.org.

Nashwa Nasreldin is a writer, editor, and a translator of Arabic literature whose book translations include the collaborative novel by nine refugee writers, Shatila Stories, Talib Alrefai’s debut novel, Shadow of the Sun, and a co-translation of Samar Yazbek’s memoir, The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria. A former current affairs documentary producer and journalist, Nashwa has reported on stories from around the Middle East and North Africa. She holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and her poems have appeared in a number of literary journals in the UK and further afield. As well as translating and writing poetry, Nashwa writes feature articles and reviews for literary and cultural publications.

What I do:

I commission and edit the PTC’s list of incredible dual-language poetry collections. I am always on the lookout for potential collaborations with poets and translators in the UK and beyond. If you’d like to discuss a creative partnership then please do get in touch!

You can contact Nashwa at nashwa@poetrytranslation.org.

Ellen McAteer is a poet and songwriter. Their first collection is forthcoming from Verve Poetry Press in October 2024. Their poetry pamphlet Honesty Mirror, published by Red Squirrel Press, won First Prize in the New Writer pamphlet competition judged by Helen Mort. They have been a visiting lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art and on the University of Oxford Creative Writing MSt, a mentee of Rachel Long under an Arts Council DYCP grant, and of the Clydebuilt Verse Apprenticeship Scheme, under Alexander Hutchison, and they have an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths. As well as working with the Poetry Translation Centre, they are Founder and trustee of Tell It Slant poetry bookshop in Glasgow.

What I do:

As Publishing Manager, I develop and maintain the PTC’s key relationships with co-publishers, retailers and distributors. I also manage the biennial Sarah Maguire Prize for new books of poetry in translation from beyond Europe. If you are interested in buying or stocking our books, featuring our prize shortlist, or entering the prize, I am the person to talk to.

You can contact Ellen at ellen@poetrytranslation.org.

Cornelius Gibbons is an arts administrator and project coordinator based in London. He has an MA with distinction in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy from Goldsmiths, and a BA in Art History from the University of Birmingham. Having held various positions across the cultural sector, his primary aims are to facilitate and enable the production of arts and culture. He has a keen interest in the crossovers between film and poetry.

What I do:

I assist on events planning and delivery, as well as communications and sales. I am also assisting Ellen in the management of the Sarah Maguire Prize 2024. If you are interested in enquiring about any of the above, please feel free to email me.

You can contact Cornelius at cornelius@poetrytranslation.org.

Bern Roche Farrelly is a writer, dramaturg and producer with ten years of experience as an arts administrator. His work includes writing and directing Determine, a choose your own adventure style play set in a world without free will at The Yard Theatre in 2014. He produced The People Versus Democracy, an interactive theatre game for Hobo Theatre. Performed at London’s Free Word Centre during the 2015 UK general Election the show was called ‘A provocative piece of theatre’ by RemoteGoat and received a five-star review from BritishTheatre.com. He was the dramaturg and producer of Freud The Musical, at the King’s Head Theatre in 2016 & VAULT festival in 2018. He is a founding member of Working Birthday theatre company.

What I do:

As Participation Producer, I manage the PTC’s collaborative translation workshops, our UNDERTOW development programme, the Queer Digital Residency and the Radical Approaches Reading Group. I also produce our Dual Poetry Podcast. If you are interested in running a poetry translation workshop in your community, I am the person to talk to.

You can contact Bern at bern@poetrytranslation.org.

Helen Bowell is a poet, producer and editor joining the Poetry Translation Centre from The Poetry Society, where she was an Education Officer for nearly six years running its Young Poets Network and Poets in Schools programmes. Since 2015, she has also been a co-director of Dead [Women] Poets Society, a collective that seeks to ‘resurrect’ women poets of the past through events and online, and which completed an Arts Council England funded national tour in 2021. She co-guest-edited the Autumn 2020 Modern Poetry in Translation focus on dead women poets and has had co-translations published in Poetry London and Modern Poetry in Translation. She also runs poetry workshops for organisations like Spread the Word and the Royal Society of Literature, and translation workshops for the PTC. In 2023-24, she is running Bi+ Lines, a community poetry project that will result in the first anthology of bi+ poets in English published by fourteen poems. She is also a Ledbury Poetry Critic with reviews in Magma, Poetry Wales and Ink, Sweat & Tears. Her debut poetry pamphlet The Barman was published by Bad Betty Press in 2022 and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Photo courtesy of Hayley Madden.

What I do:

I’m the Events Producer responsible for running the PTC’s 20th birthday programme of events in 2024. I will be organising showcases, readings, workshops and community events with a number of local and international partners in cities across England, featuring some of the poets and translators the PTC has worked with over the past 20 years. Get in touch with me if you’d like to partner on an event.

You can contact Helen at helen@poetrytranslation.org.

Ecre Karadag is a translator and marketer with an arts and community engagement background. She has an MA Translation degree from SOAS, University of London and most recently an MA in Japanese Studies from Sophia University, Tokyo. While studying in Tokyo, she was head of editorial and rights at The COMM, a multilingual Japanese street fashion magazine that has been recognised in Vogue, i-D, Glamour and the 2020 British Fashion Awards. As well as working at the PTC and as a Japanese-English translator, Ecre works at Fitzrovia Community Centre, supporting their fundraising, monitoring and evaluation and runs a weekly community poetry group there with poet and translator Yvonne Green.

What I do:

As Marketing and Communications Manager, I oversee the PTC’s communications strategy, social media accounts and website and work with our poets, translators and partners to promote our workshops, publications and events through digital campaigns. If you would like to discuss anything marketing, digital and promotion, please get in touch.

You can contact Ecre at ecre@poetrytranslation.org.

Sam Dodd has been a literature sector arts administrator for over a decade, coming to us with experience from The Poetry Society, First Story, Prison Reading Groups, Free Word, and English PEN. Sam is also a writing mentor for Arkbound specialising in working-class, queer and female voices, a landworker at Spitalfields City Farm, and a trustee for Spread the Word writer development agency. She co-founded and then project managed intergenerational community engagement life writing project, CityLife Stories, from 2014 to 2024.

What I do:

As Operations Manager I look after the day-to-day operations of the PTC, including bookkeeping, banking, HMRC, HR, Companies House, Charity Commission, budgets and financial reports; systems, suppliers and services; and board/governance organisation and administration.

You can contact Sam at sam@poetrytranslation.org.

Bohdan Piasecki is a poet from Poland based in Birmingham. A committed performer, he has taken his poems from the upstairs room in an Eastbourne pub to the main stage of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, from underground Tokyo clubs to tramways in Paris, from a bookshop in Beijing to an airfield in Germany, from niche podcasts to BBC Radio. In the UK, he regularly features at the country’s most exciting spoken word nights, festivals, and readings. He enjoys the creative chaos of big field festivals just as much as the composed concentration of literary events.

Bohdan founded the first poetry slam in Poland before moving to the UK to get a doctorate in Translation Studies from the University of Warwick. He has worked as Director of Education on the Spoken Word in Education MA course at Goldsmiths University, and was the Midlands Producer for Apples and Snakes between 2010 and 2017. Since 2012, he has been a regular Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. He currently holds the post of Creative Producer at Beatfreeks.

Jorge Llorens has worked for more than 20 years in the finance sector, in London and Madrid. Throughout his career in investment and corporate banking, he has held senior management roles in international organizations such as Goldman Sachs, EBRD and BBVA, in areas such as Mergers & Acquisitions advisory and Client Coverage.

Jorge is also a Treasurer and Trustee at Voluntary Action Islington.

Alireza Abiz is an Iranian poet, literary critic and translator.

Abiz has written extensively on Persian contemporary literature and culture. His scholarly book ‘Censorship of Literature in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Politics and Culture since 1979’ is forthcoming by I. B. Tauris.

He has so far published five collections of poetry in Persian: Stop! We must get off, Spaghetti with Mexican Sauce, I can hear a tree from my desk, 13/1 Koohsangi Street, and Black Line- London Underground which won the Shamlou Poetry Award in 2018. His sixth collection, The Desert Monitor is forthcoming. Abiz is an award-winning translator and has translated some leading English language poets including W.B. Yeats, Ted Hughes, Basil Bunting, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg and C.K. Williams into Persian.

Abiz has also worked in the media as a journalist and broadcast journalist and is currently employed as the Creative Director in a media company.

Janet Remmington is a scholarly publisher, researcher, reviewer, and writer. She works as journals editorial director for the global Arts & Humanities programme and regional director for Africa at Routledge, Taylor & Francis. With two decades of publishing experience, she has pioneered interdisciplinary publications and partnership arrangements, and championed global South authorship and resource access. In her research capacity, Janet has published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on African literature, and she co-edited Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present, which won the 2018 Non-Fiction Prize from South Africa’s National Institute for Humanities and the Social Sciences. She is completing a cultural history of black South African travel texts for a PhD at the University of York. Janet has Masters degrees in English Literature (University of Cape Town), African Studies (University of Oxford), Creative Writing (Royal Holloway, University of London) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Studies in Publishing (Oxford Brookes). She has published creative non-fiction, poetry, and reviews in literary magazines, while facilitating creative exchanges and publication opportunities across borders.

Tatevik Sargsyan is a social change practitioner working on strategic development, design and delivery of social change programmes. In her previous roles at The Young Foundation and Design Council, she supported a range of social enterprises to deliver scalable social impact in the UK and worked across various social change initiatives including education and young people, arts and culture, mental health and financial inclusion. She has also worked with arts organisations and written for cultural magazines, including the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in London and Lisbon, where she developed The Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Series. She is interested in the civic role of the arts and developing narratives which bridge divides and act as a catalyst for social change. Tatevik is bilingual in Armenian and English, fluent in German and also studied Russian, Spanish and Portuguese. Currently, she is a Senior Designer at the RSA and Founding Editor of Anamot Press.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared widely in journals including The Poetry Review, in addition to BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour. She is an Eric Gregory Award winner, and has held artist residencies in London, the USA and Brazil. Victoria is the director of MOTHER TONGUES, a poetry, film and translation project supported by Arts Council England and Autograph.

Rachael Allen is the co-author of Jolene, a collaborative book of poems and photographs with Guy Gormley, and Nights of Poor Sleep, a book of paintings and poems with Marie Jacotey. Her first collection, Kingdomland, is published by Faber & Faber in 2019. She is the recipient of a Northern Writers Award and an Eric Gregory Award. She is the poetry editor for Granta, co-editor at the poetry press clinic and online journal tender.

Leo Boix is a Latino British poet, translator and journalist based in the UK. He has published two collections in Spanish, Un lugar propio (2015) and Mar de noche (2017), and was included in many anthologies, such as Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe) and Why Poetry? (Verve Poetry Press). His English poems have appeared in Poetry, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, PNReview, The Rialto, Litro, Magma, Brittle Star, Letras Libres, South Bank Poetry, The Morning Star, The Laurel Review and elsewhere. Boix is a fellow of The Complete Works Program and co-director of ‘Invisible Presence’, a scheme to nurture new young voices of Latino poets in the UK.

Mary Jean Chan is a poet, editor and academic from Hong Kong. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and came Second in the 2017 National Poetry Competition. Her debut pamphlet, A Hurry of English, is published by Ignition Press, and was recently selected as the 2018 Poetry Book Society Summer Pamphlet Choice. Mary Jean is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and an editor of Oxford Poetry. Her debut collection will be published by Faber & Faber in July 2019. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University, and currently lives in London.

Tice Cin is a poet and writer from Tottenham, North London. Her work has been published in Skin Deep Magazine and commissioned by venues including St Paul’s Cathedral and Battersea Arts Centre. An alumnus of the poetry community Barbican Young Poets, she recently took part in the Barbican’s Art of Change series and is part of the centre’s Design Yourself collective. She is also a Literary Fiction awardee of Spread The Word’s London Writers Awards. A consultant with community project New Muslim Stories, she is passionate about helping marginalised voices reach their potential. Currently, she’s creating poetic sound portraits with composer Pietro Bardini highlighting the sonic beauty of linguistic and dialectical crossings.

Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a cross art form practitioner, a poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer and founder of the Midnight Run — an international, arts-filled, night-time, playful, urban, walking experience. He is a Complete Works poet alumni and a designer at White Space Creative Agency. Across his work, Identity, Displacement & Destiny are reoccurring themes in which he also tries to mix the old with the new: traditional African storytelling with contemporary poetry, pencil with pixel, texture with vector images. His poetry is published by Flipped Eye, Akashic, Nine Arches & several plays by Oberon.

Alice Kate Mullen is Manager of the Poetry Book Society. She read English Literature at Durham University. She has worked in poetry publishing since 2010 and was Marketing and Events Manager for Carcanet Press, Anvil and PN Review. She previously worked in bookselling and events co-ordinating at Waterstones and Shakespeare & Company, Paris, completed an Arts Council mentorship at Chicago’s Poetry Foundation in 2013 and was an Assistant Bibliotherapist at Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2016. In 2017 she co-founded the now annual Northern Poetry Symposium, a major state of the nation poetry summit at Sage, Gateshead.

Sarah Shin is a publisher and curator. She is a co-founder and director of Silver Press, a feminist publisher of books including Your Silence Will Not Protect You, a collection of Audre Lorde’s poetry, speeches and essays, and Ignota Books, an innovative press at the intersection of technology, myth-making and magic that launched with Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry co-edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás. She is the creator of New Suns: A Feminist Literary Festival, a bookfair and day of talks, screenings and workshops through the lens of mythology, held at the Barbican Centre in its inaugural year in 2018. She works at Verso Books.

Francisco Vilhena is assistant editor at Granta magazine. He writes short essays and translates from the Portuguese; his work can be found in Modern Poetry in Translation, clinic, Wasafiri, Brooklyn Rail, Granta and elsewhere. He has served as bridge translator on several PTC translation workshops. His cat is one of the first feline polyglots.

Khánh Hạ is an aspiring producer, researcher, and maker from Đà Lạt, Việt Nam. With over six years of experience as a non-resident immigrant and more than four years of expertise in struggling to be a struggling artist, their creative practice seeks to recognise joy and wonder in the alien, the transitory, and the mundane. They have worked extensively with arts and cultural organisations in the UK, US and Việt Nam to develop socially engaged art projects and community programming despite insisting to be a non-people person. Khánh Hạ is currently based in London, where they recently finished their master’s in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy at Goldsmiths University of London.