The Poetry Translation Centre was established by the poet Sarah Maguire in 2004, to give the best poems from around the world a new life in the English language, to explore poetries from the home-cultures of the UK’s diverse diaspora communities, and to enrich English-language poetry through translation.
The PTC emerged from a series of poetry translation workshops that Sarah initiated while on a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at SOAS, University of London. The workshops brought together language scholars at SOAS and poetry enthusiasts from the wider community to collaboratively translate poems from Asian, African and Latin American languages into English for the first time. Workshops offered by the PTC today still follow a similar model, and are open to anyone with an interest in poetry and the craft of translation.
In June 2004 the PTC was officially launched, with a multilingual poetry reading featuring poems from Sudan, Mexico, Ethiopia, South Korea, Mozambique, India, Peru and Somaliland.
2005 saw the PTC’s first World Poets Tour, supported by Arts Council England, where six distinguished poets travelled around the UK, presenting their poetry to audiences alongside their translators at dual-language readings which have become the PTC’s signature style of event.
After three fruitful years under the auspices of SOAS, the PTC became incorporated as a company limited by guarantee in July 2007 and became a registered charity in March 2008. 2008 also saw the PTC’s second World Poets Tour, and its first chapbook series, published in association with Enitharmon Books.
Touring continued to be central to the PTC’s activities, with a tour of Mexican poets in 2010 and two Persian poet tours in 2012 and 2013. During this time the PTC developed valuable partnerships with many UK literary festivals and institutions which continue to the present day, including Ledbury Poetry Festival, Manchester Literature Festival, the Southbank Centre, Newcastle Poetry Festival and the National Centre for Writing.
In April 2012 the Poetry Translation Centre joined Arts Council England’s National Portfolio, and continues to receive statutory funding through this programme today.
Since 2004 the PTC has worked closely with the UK’s Somali community, in particular through London-based organisation Kayd Somali Arts and Culture. In 2013 this partnership produced its first book, Hadraawi: The Poet and the Man, an essential volume on the poet known as ‘the Somali Shakespeare’.
In 2014 the PTC celebrated its tenth anniversary with a new publishing partnership with Bloodaxe Books and the publication of the seminal poetry anthology My Voice: A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre. The PTC continues to publish poetry collections in collaboration with Bloodaxe Books, by major international names such as Azita Ghahreman (translated by Elhum Shakerifar with Maura Dooley), Legna Rodríguez Iglesias (translated by Abigail Parry and Serafina Vick) and Diana Anphimiadi (translated by Natalia Bukia-Peters with Jean Sprackland).
Erica Hesketh joined the PTC as Managing Director in 2016, and became Director when Sarah died of cancer in late 2017.
In 2017 and 2018 the PTC toured leading women poets from Turkey and Georgia, alongside new chapbooks. Work began towards establishing a new literary prize in honour of Sarah’s lifelong commitment to poetry in translation, the Sarah Maguire Prize, which formally launched in 2019 and was first awarded in 2020 to Yang Lian and his translator Brian Holton for Anniversary Snow.
2019 also saw the launch of the PTC’s World Poet Series, a series which introduces leading international poets in a dual-language format, with the English and original-language poems displayed side by side. World Poet Series titles have been shortlisted for numerous awards and selected as the Poetry Book Society Translation Choice. PTC books are distributed by Inpress in the UK and SPD in the USA.
The PTC’s touring work continued, with poets from Brazil, Algeria, China, Cuba, Argentina, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Georgia and Eritrea meeting UK audiences between 2019 and 2023. Covid-19 restrictions in 2020–21 meant that some events needed to be delivered online. Online events and workshops are now a regular part of the PTC’s public programme.
Since 2020 the PTC has expanded into artist development for poets and translators. 2021 saw the launch of UNDERTOW, the PTC’s programme for young poets from diaspora heritage backgrounds. In 2022 the PTC delivered its first digital translators residency in partnership with the University of San Andrès, Buenos Aires, working with queer-identifying translators from the UK and Argentina. In 2023 UNDERTOW was delivered in partnership with Lagos International Poetry Festival, with a focus on Nigerian-heritage poets.
To mark the PTC’s 20th anniversary, the PTC published its first craft book, Living in Language: International reflections for the practising poet, featuring essays by poets from around the world in English translation.
In 2024, Erica Hesketh passed the baton to Nariman Youssef, the new Director of the PTC.