'And Graven with Diamondes': poet-translators from Wyatt to Constantine
A lively evening of poetry and discussion with David Constantine, Chris Beckett, and Fahad Al-Amoudi reading from their own collections and talking about the importance of translation and poetry from other traditions in their working practice. The event will be introduced by Niall Munro (Director, Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre).
Entry is free and refreshments will be provided!
David Constantine read Modern Languages at Wadham College, Oxford. From 1969-1981, he taught German at the University of Durham and then took up a Fellowship in German at The Queen’s College, Oxford, which he held until 2000, when he was elected to a Supernumerary Fellowship. He now lives in Oxford and the Isles of Scilly, working as a freelance writer and translator.
David is a former literary editor of The Oxford Magazine and from 2003 to 2012 he was joint editor (with Helen Constantine) of Modern Poetry in Translation. He was awarded an Honorary DLitt by the University of Durham, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. David was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2020.
He has published a dozen volumes of poetry, two novels, and five collections of short stories. David is an editor and translator of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht. In 2018 Bloodaxe published his new and greatly enlarged Selected Poetry of Hölderlin and Norton a Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht translated by Tom Kuhn and him. In 2024, Bloodaxe published his translation A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from The Greek Anthology.
There is more information about David and his work on the Bloodaxe website.
Chris Beckett was born in London but grew up mostly in Ethiopia, where his father worked at the British Embassy in Addis Ababa. Chris won the Poetry London competition in 2001, and Sketches from the Poem Road, a collaboration with his partner, the Japanese artist and sculptor Isao Miura, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2015. Carcanet has published two collections of poems about his boyhood in Ethiopia, Ethiopia Boy (2013) and Tenderfoot (2020).
Carcanet also published the first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry in English, Songs We Learn from Trees, which Chris translated/edited together with Alemu Tebeje. Songs was a finalist in the 2021 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, judged by Chris Abani. Having helped Gale Burns host The Shuffle in Covent Garden for the 10 years, Chris now runs a new reading series at the Wheatsheaf pub off Oxford Street. Chris was formerly chair of the Anglo Ethiopian Society and a trustee of the Poetry Society.
You can learn more about Chris's writing on his website.
Fahad Al-Amoudi is a writer and editor. His work has been published in The Poetry Review, Wasafiri, The London Magazine, and Mizna. Fahad was the winner of the White Review Poet’s Prize 2022 and shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize 2022. He is an alumnus of the Obsidian Foundation and a graduate of the Writing Squad.
Fahad's debut pamphlet, when the flies come (ignitionpress), was selected as a Poetry Book Society Winter Choice 2023 and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award 2023.
Find out more about Fahad's work on his website.
