Join us for a multinational, multilingual poetry event, bringing together young poets from the UK and Singapore via live video hook-up, to read poems that exist in many languages.
A positive look at a potential future for poetry and self-expression unbound by linguistic categories and national borders.
There will be poetry readings and a discussion of multilingual creativity from 6 poets from the Poetry Translation Centre (UK)’s UNDERTOW programme, who are joined by 6 emerging young poets in Singapore. For the past few months, these two groups of poets participated in a cross-cultural peer-to-peer mentoring programme to develop their creative expression in the languages they identify with.
This live event will be in a hybrid format, with live audiences at the Manchester Poetry Library and Sing Lit Station
ABOUT THE POETS
Conan Tan / SINGAPOREis an undergraduate at the University of Oxford. Based between the UK and Singapore, he was the winner of Singapore’s 2022 National Poetry Competition. A Best of the Net nominee, their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Rattle, Verse Daily, Alien, West Trade Review, HAD, and elsewhere. His works can be found at conantan.com.
Tue Dinh Cao (pronounced like “tway”) / SINGAPOREmakes art. While daydreaming being a flaneur, he explores and engages with cultural stories—historical and contemporary—and across various disciplines and artforms, especially literary and performing arts. He gathers and embraces stories, traversing across and playing with thresholds and liminalities: there is always more diversity and interconnections than what meets the eye. Tue is also a player of the ‘dan bau’, a one-string Vietnamese instrument and, from time to time, has to admit he is kinda obsessed with Sondheim’s musicals.
Nicole Ang / SINGAPOREis a freshman at the National University of Singapore majoring in Political Science and English Literature. She is an avid consumer of Chinese media and Japanese anime, loves pretending that she’s a Broadway star when she sings musical theatre songs in the bathroom (with debatable success), and holds her friends from church and NUS College (NUSC) very close to her heart. She will readily initiate a heart-to-heart conversation with almost anyone, as she enjoys hearing about other people’s lives. As of 2024, she enjoys reading about nostalgia, home, and how people aspire towards love and tenderness in a world increasingly ridden with conflict and violence.
Nurhafidzah Binte Hamzah / SINGAPORENurhafidzah Binte Hamzah’s work explores themes of identity, language, and the human experience, ranging from reflections on everyday life to deeper explorations of culture and emotions, often drawing from her own experiences in Singapore’s multicultural society. Featured in Layl Ash-Shayr Vol. 1: The Opening Act, she has recently begun sharing her work more publicly, seeking to connect with readers on a personal level. With a deep interest in multilingual creativity, Nurhafidzah experiments with English, Malay, and Bahasa Indonesia, exploring how different languages can add depth and resonance to her writing.
Rochelle Lee / SINGAPOREis an aspiring writer from Singapore who writes comfort poems that she needs to read but can never seem to find out there. She has been previously published in Amber: The Teenage Chapbook, the All In! Snack Fiction Anthology, and the Zubir Anthology, and is currently studying English Literature at King’s College London. Please feel free to drop her a helpful emotional check-in via @handpickedhearton Instagram.
Zeha / SINGAPOREis a multi-disciplinary artist. They are interested in dissecting memories to reimagine the past and the humans of the now. They enjoy how malleable language is and loves to construct and deconstruct mainly the malay and english language to conjure microscopic imageries and paint soundscapes. Their performances centre around the relationships between family, queerness, ethnicity, familiarity and reconcilation. They have been a part of Pooja Nansi’s 2020 Biennale commision activation, ‘Coping Mechanism’, read at the 2022 Singapore Writers’ Festival’s closing event, ‘…Only to Arrive at the Same Place Together’ and was a featured reader for Spoke & Bird open mic reading (2023).
ZainaB Imran / UKis a poet and facilitator of British Pakistani heritage from Manchester. She writes on a multitude of racial issues, with a particular focus on the queer diaspora, the hidden stories of women in the colonial struggle and post-colonial journeys to the West. In 2022, they were awarded the Royal Society of Literature and Sky Arts Award for Poetry as an emerging writer of colour, and was part of the Words a Stage 2.0 cohort with Apples and Snakes. Zainab is now working towards their PhD in creative writing at the University of St Andrews discussing race, queerness and dichotomy in diasporic identity.
Frank Qi / UKis a British-Chinese poet raised in Kent. He is a winner of the Foyle Young Poets Competition 2023, and was mentored by poets Jane Yeh and Jonathan Edwards. Particularly interested in the exploration of his dual cultural backgrounds, his poetry revolves around themes of belonging and identity. He will be attending university next year to study Psychology.
Noah Jacob / UKis an interdisciplinary poet, performer and critic based in London of mixed Arab heritage. Her writing often explores the boundaries between human and unhuman, interrogating the poetry within biology, automaton, and nature. She was an editor and co-wrote a column on diaspora poetry for Zindabad Zine, and is an alum of Roundhouse Resident Artists, and Barbican Young Poets. She is also an alum of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, Apples and Snakes’s The Writing Room and T.S. Eliot Prize Young Critics. Her work has been featured by Love Supreme, We Out Here, 05: Redacted, Shubbak, Camden Inspire and Peckham Festivals, as well as in Ink, Sweat and Tears, orangepeel, Hecate, and Kalopsia mags. She is working on a poetry-music E.P., exploring themes of pan-Arab identity, heritage, and intergenerational relationships, as well as nature, mythology, and religion.
Ethan Chua / UK (any pronouns)is a Chinese-Filipino poet, community organiser, and translator. Their first chapbook, Sky Ladders, won the Frost Place / Bull City Press 2022 chapbook contest. Their graphic novel, Doorkeeper. is available in Philippine bookstores. Their poetry has been published in Five Points and The Journal, their translations can be found in AGNI and Asymptote, and their words have been featured in the Washington Post.
Soledad Santana / UKis a Venezuelan, London-based poet, feminist community organiser, and human rights researcher. She’s studying International Human Rights Law at Oxford University, and is an alumnus of the Barbican Young Poets programme. She has co-created various zines, including Tangled Tongues / Lenguas Enredadas, which examines the politics of monolingual publications and self-translation, and collates Spanglish poetry and short fiction. Recently, she’s interested in writing on political violence, and its effects on interpersonal, familial relationships. IG: @Lasoledadsantana
Tayiba Sulaiman / UKis a writer and translator from Manchester. She graduated with a degree in English and Modern Languages in 2023, and completed an Emerging Translators Mentorship with Jamie Lee Searle in 2024. She currently works for New Books in German. Her recent translations from German include poetry by Swiss-Croatian writer Dragica Rajčić Holzner and a verse script for the 2024 Droste Festival at the Centre for Literature, Burg Hülshoff. She also writes poetry and prose; her work has recently appeared in Prospect Magazine, Briefly Write and on The Poetry Business’ blog. Her poem ‘Reading’ won the Eugene Lee-Hamilton Prize in 2021. She is a member of The Writing Squad and is currently working on a project responding to three major archival collections in Manchester: the North West Film Archive, Manchester Metropolitan University’s Special Collection, and the Manchester Poetry Library.
About the Poetry Translation Centre & UNDERTOW
The Poetry Translation Centre gives contemporary poems from Africa, Asia and Latin America a new life in the English language, working with diaspora communities for whom poetry is of great importance. UNDERTOW is the Poetry Translation Centre’s Youth programme that focuses on working with people from mixed heritage and diaspora backgrounds to unlock the creative potential of polylingualism.
About Sing Lit Station
Sing Lit Station is a platform where readers and writers can meet. Their core mission is to serve the local literary community of writers and readers in Singapore: by creating a space for writers to grow their artistic and professional lives; and inviting readers to explore our literary culture.
