World Poet

Najwan Darwish is one of the most significant voices to have emerged in Arabic this century. His poems – often written in response to historical injustices in Palestine and beyond – can be woundingly direct or disconcertingly witty. He published his first book of poetry in 2000 and has been an important literary figure ever since; his work has been translated into over twenty languages. The New York Review Books, which published the English translation of his collection Nothing More to Lose in 2014, describes him as 'one of the foremost Arabic-language poets of his generation'. This selection of his recent work showcases the variety and force of his lyric talent, and includes an afterword by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee. The Poetry Translation Centre's World Poet Series showcases the most exciting living poets from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, in beautiful pocket-sized bilingual editions. "Embrace by Najwan Darwish continues the Poetry Translation Centre's amazing project to bring work from all over the world to the attention of English-speaking eyes and ears. Darwish is very much a poet for our fractured times and works hard to make work that is at once approachable but which also sings with great depth of meaning. As he says 'We will keep meeting and bidding farewell/like two lost waves in a vast sea'." - Ian McMillan

An acclaimed writer in multiple genres as well as a journalist and academic, Karin Karakașlı has repeatedly turned to poetry to chart complex emotional geographies – both her own and those of her country, Turkey. Her highly cinematic poems are powered by music, metaphor and a fascination for the mechanics of language itself. Running through her work is a deeply held belief in the emancipatory potential of words. Following on from her 2019 chapbook History-Geography, this new selection brings together poems from Karakașlı's 15-year career, vividly translated into English by translator and writer Canan Marașligil working with British poet Sarah Howe.

Poet, activist, educator, lawyer and diplomat, Corsino Fortes (1933-2015) was Cape Verde's ambassador to Portugal and Angola. Writing in Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese, his first collection was published to great acclaim in 1974, the year Portugal's Estado Novo regime collapsed, leading to the decolonisation of Cape Verde and other African colonies in 1975. Corsino Fortes's poems offer vivid and often hallucinatory glimpses of the land, sea and people of his country - word-scapes rooted in the earth and the body. This is a wider selection of this seminal poet's work, translated by Daniel Hahn with the poet Sean O'Brien.

The poems in this World Poet Series book emerged in the aftermath of Al-Raddi's arrival, when he was separated from his wife and children for nearly five years. During late, uncertain nights awake in a strange city, he would write brief, mystical, often stream-of-consciousness texts to post on Facebook, his primary means of communication with loved ones in Khartoum. These texts grew over time into A Friend's Kitchen, a profound collection that deals with both the spiritual incomprehensibility and physical reality of exile. It is rendered into English by the translator Bryar Bajalan working with Al-Raddi's friend and fellow poet Shook.

Mona Kareem is a stateless poet, born in Kuwait, whose work has been internationally acclaimed for its power and immediacy ever since she published her first collection at the age of 14. Her writing comes out of the experience of growing up with 'Bidoon' status (from 'bidoon jinsiya' or 'without nationality'); an Arab minority denied Kuwaiti citizenship rights, who were categorised as 'illegal residents' and stripped of their access to employment, education, social welfare and official documentation a year before her birth. Her poems are surreal, relying heavily on vivid metaphors, often to bridge the gap between the self and what lies outside the self. They enact a boundless porosity between the body, nature, and the material world. Kareem plays with language to explore the infinite depths of human experience and identity. These poems, with dates, times and places obscured, present us with new maps of precarious, unstable, and permeable geopolitics. Kareem delineates 'rupture' as a facet of the migrant's experience.

Víctor Terán has been described as the most 'personal' poet of the Zapotec Isthmus of Oaxaca, Mexico. His poems, highly lyrical and imagistic, explore two deep passions: the electricity that passes between bodies in love, and Terán's fierce devotion to the Indigenous land and language of his birth. This carefully curated selection of poems, drawing from the whole of Terán's poetic oeuvre, is translated into English by his long-time translator and interlocutor, the poet Shook, working from Spanish bridge-translations made by the author. The Poetry Translation Centre's World Poet Series showcases the most exciting living poets from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. "These are stunning, halting, lilting poems of flesh and flower, of boulder and bone. Vivid and meditative, I hummed among their hills, they hummed in mine." - Inua Ellams "These beautiful, subtle, sumptuous translations set alongside the original work make for a feast for the ears and the eyes alike." - Adam O'Riordan "In Víctor Terán's poetry, the elements of nature are sentient, almost mischievous, and share blood ties with the people of Juchitán, the poet's birthplace and the father of the hurricane wind, the mother of the sun. The north wind raises its whip, trees laugh, the day gets fed up, the afternoon eats its meal, the clamour of winged ants announce the rains, the world opens up her thighs, while a white flower spurns no one. And within this universe, poems of love and resistance share in the ritual and celebrations, suffused with light and devotion: 'the lit tulip of your lips'; 'breath of god, / breath that lights and snuffs out / the candle flame / that is life.' In Shook's luminous translations, the emotions of longing open up their eyes in the night, alive and breathing as the moon: 'Delirious moon, like a colander / that dreams of overflowing with water.'" - Juana Adcock