Poetry Translation Centre

Sarah Maguire

Sarah Maguire is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre.

She has 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. Currently, she is translating the work of Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi with Sabry Hafez, Research Professor of Arabic at SOAS. Their version of Mahmoud Darwish's A State of Siege formed the centrepiece of the first issue of the new series of Modern Poetry in Translation (Third series; volume 1; 2004). With Yama Yari, she co-translated A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear (Chatto, 2006) by Atiq Rahimi, Afghanistan's leading novelist.

Sarah is the only living English-language poet with a book in print in Arabic. Her selected 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.

In March this year, 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.

Poems translated by Sarah Maguire

• Please Don't Give Birth!
• Tiris
• Lines on Wood
• Saguia
• Our Old Bed
• At Thirty, the Party is Over
• Survivors
• A Monkey at the Window
• Breathless
• Song
• Small Fox
• In the Company of Michelangelo
• Garden Statues
• Aguifreda Bay
• Everything
• Horizon