Sarah Maguire published four highly-acclaimed collections of poetry, Spilt Milk (Secker; 1991; reprinted PBS; 2007), The Invisible Mender (Cape; 1997), The Florist’s at Midnight (Cape; 2001) and The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto; 2007), a Poetry Book Society Choice that was short-listed for the TS Eliot Prize, 2007. Sarah edited the innovative and popular anthology Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse which was published in 2001.
Sarah was the first writer to be sent to Palestine (in 1996) and to Yemen (in 1998) by the British Council. Since then she has been active in translating contemporary Arabic poetry into English. With Yama Yari, she co-translated A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear (Chatto, 2006) by Atiq Rahimi, Afghanistan’s leading novelist.
A selection of Sarah’s poems, Haleeb Muraq, translated by the leading Iraqi poet, Saadi Yousef (the distinguished patron of the Poetry Translation Centre) was published by Dar Al-Mada in Damascus in 2003.
She has a book in print in Malayalam: a selected poems, Kandaharile Mathalanarngagal, translated by Abraham Anthony, was published in Kerala in 2010.
In March 2008, Sarah gave the StAnza Lecture 2008 at the St Andrews Poetry Festival on the subject of ‘Poetry and Conflict’. A link to her lecture is given on the right. In June 2008, Sarah received a prestigious Cholmondeley Award.
Sarah Maguire was the founder and first director of the Poetry Translation Centre. She died in November 2017.
