Join us at 7pm (BST) on Thursday 22 April 2021 for the online launch of MPT ‘Clean Hands: Focus on the Pandemic in Europe’. We’ll be hosting this launch in Zoom, and live captioning will be provided by rev.ai.

MPT Editor Clare Pollard will be joined remotely by Simone Atangana Bekono, Safiye Can, David Constantine, Martin Kratz and David Colmer. Tune in for readings from the latest issue of MPT and a discussion on poetry and the pandemic.

We’ll also be answering your questions on the night – so please email questions in advance to webeditor@mptmagazine.com with ‘Clean Hands Pandemic Focus online launch’ in the subject line. We’ll also try to accommodate further questions at the end of the event.

About the participants

Simone Atangana Bekono’s book hoe de eerste vonken zichtbaar waren, a collection of poems and letters, won the Poëziedebuutprijs Aan Zee prize for the best Dutch-language poetry debut, and she has won the prestigious Charlotte Köhler Stipendium for new Dutch writers. Her first novel is Confrontaties (Lebowski, 2020). how the first sparks became visible, translated by David Colmer, is out now with The Emma Press.

Safiye Can is a prizewinning poet, author, and literary translator from Offenbach, Germany. She has published three bestselling collections of poetry and translates from Turkish into German. www.safiyecan.de

David Constantine, poet, translator and novelist, has been awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2020.

Martin Kratz’s most recent translations from the German have appeared in The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2019). He is the project manager at Manchester Poetry Library.

David Colmer translates Dutch literature. He has won a number of translation prizes, including the PEN Translation Prize for his body of work and the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize ( four times ).

About MPT ‘Clean Hands: Focus on the Pandemic in Europe’

MPT’s spring issue ‘Clean Hands’ focuses on the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe, featuring the Stanza/MPT Windowswap Project; a conversation between Simone Atangana Bekono and Jay Bernard about the language of lockdown; and new poems and translations from across the continent including Jan Wagner, Stella N’Djoku, David Harsent, Safiye Can, David Constantine, Agnes Agboton, and many more. Also: an introduction to Uyghur poetry curated by Munawwar Abdulla, Naush Sabah’s version of ‘Qasida Burda’, and climate change poems by Marion Poschmann, translated by Jen Calleja. All this and more in the groundbreaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation: for the best in world poetry read MPT.