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.
