For the last in this series of workshops we will be looking at a pair of contemporary Urdu poets, Zehra Nigah from Pakistan and Javed Akhtar from India. These poets are brought to us by translator and award-winning novelist Marion Molteno. Marion introduces the poems and their context, and provides ‘literal’ translations, before the group works together to create new English versions. This workshop will be facilitated by acclalimed UK poet Clare Pollard.
Individual workshops cost £7. Students and retirees pay £4 per session. For the unwaged and refugees the sessions are free.
The workshops run from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM.
NEW THIS TERM: We are running a loyalty scheme where each workshop attended will earn you points towards free PTC chapbooks and poetry collections.
Read about the Poets and Translators:
Zehra Nigah from Pakistan and Javed Akhtar from India are both highly regarded poets in a culture in which poetry is almost universally popular. Zehra Nigah was one of the first women poets to challenge the traditional roles of women. Javed Akhtar, in addition to being a poet, is an award winning screen-play writer for Bollywood. Both grew up in families steeped in the traditions of classical poetry, and have used both traditional and new forms.
Marion Molteno is a prize-winning novelist whose writing draws on the unusual cultural range of her life experience. If you can walk, you can dance won a Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the best book from Africa, and two of her novels feature oral poetry – Urdu and Persian poetry in her latest novel, Uncertain Light, and Somali poetry in A Shield of Coolest Air. She learnt Urdu from the eminent scholar/translator Ralph Russell and worked alongside him for 26 years, editing his books. She is now his literary executor and has just published a new edition of his writing and translations, The Famous Ghalib: The Sound of My Moving Pen. In preparing for this workshop she has drawn on the support of Delhi-based translator, Rakhshanda Jalil.
Clare Pollard received an Eric Gregory Award in 2000 and was named by The Independent as one of their ‘Top 20 Writers Under 30’. Her first poetry collection, The Heavy-Petting Zoo, was published in 1998. As a writer, Clare is very concerned with bearing witness to the times in which we live. Her work has frequently engaged with contemporary concerns, from our confessional media culture in Bedtime, to climate change in The Weather and globalisation in Look, Clare! Look!.
