Team

Nariman Youssef is a literary translator and cultural worker with expertise in the arts & heritage sector in Egypt and the UK. During nine years at the British Library, she led a bilingual editorial team and created the library’s first in-house translation operation. As well as being a long-time collaborator of the Poetry Translation Centre, Nariman has facilitated workshops with the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT), Shadow Heroes, Shubbak Festival and Africa Writes. She has recently completed a residency at the BCLT with a focus on multilingualism as a creative prism.

What I do:

As Director, I’m responsible for running and leading the charity, reporting to our board of trustees, liaising with funders and supporters, and developing partnerships to keep the PTC flourishing well into the future. If you are interested to work with us, book us for an event, or be part of our story by becoming a PTC supporter, please feel free to email me!

You can contact Nariman at nariman@poetrytranslation.org.

Nashwa Nasreldin is a writer, editor, and a translator of Arabic literature whose book translations include the collaborative novel by nine refugee writers, Shatila Stories, Talib Alrefai’s debut novel, Shadow of the Sun, and a co-translation of Samar Yazbek’s memoir, The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria. A former current affairs documentary producer and journalist, Nashwa has reported on stories from around the Middle East and North Africa. She holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and her poems have appeared in a number of literary journals in the UK and further afield. As well as translating and writing poetry, Nashwa writes feature articles and reviews for literary and cultural publications.

What I do:

I commission and edit the PTC’s list of incredible dual-language poetry collections. I am always on the lookout for potential collaborations with poets and translators in the UK and beyond. If you’d like to discuss a creative partnership then please do get in touch!

You can contact Nashwa at nashwa@poetrytranslation.org.

Ellen McAteer is a poet and songwriter. Their first collection is forthcoming from Verve Poetry Press in October 2024. Their poetry pamphlet Honesty Mirror, published by Red Squirrel Press, won First Prize in the New Writer pamphlet competition judged by Helen Mort. They have been a visiting lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art and on the University of Oxford Creative Writing MSt, a mentee of Rachel Long under an Arts Council DYCP grant, and of the Clydebuilt Verse Apprenticeship Scheme, under Alexander Hutchison, and they have an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths. As well as working with the Poetry Translation Centre, they are Founder and trustee of Tell It Slant poetry bookshop in Glasgow.

What I do:

As Publishing Manager, I develop and maintain the PTC’s key relationships with co-publishers, retailers and distributors. I also manage the biennial Sarah Maguire Prize for new books of poetry in translation from beyond Europe. If you are interested in buying or stocking our books, featuring our prize shortlist, or entering the prize, I am the person to talk to.

You can contact Ellen at ellen@poetrytranslation.org.

Cornelius Gibbons is an arts administrator and project coordinator based in London. He has an MA with distinction in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy from Goldsmiths, and a BA in Art History from the University of Birmingham. Having held various positions across the cultural sector, his primary aims are to facilitate and enable the production of arts and culture. He has a keen interest in the crossovers between film and poetry.

What I do:

I assist on events planning and delivery, as well as communications and sales. I am also assisting Ellen in the management of the Sarah Maguire Prize 2024. If you are interested in enquiring about any of the above, please feel free to email me.

You can contact Cornelius at cornelius@poetrytranslation.org.

Bern Roche Farrelly is a writer, dramaturg and producer with ten years of experience as an arts administrator. His work includes writing and directing Determine, a choose your own adventure style play set in a world without free will at The Yard Theatre in 2014. He produced The People Versus Democracy, an interactive theatre game for Hobo Theatre. Performed at London’s Free Word Centre during the 2015 UK general Election the show was called ‘A provocative piece of theatre’ by RemoteGoat and received a five-star review from BritishTheatre.com. He was the dramaturg and producer of Freud The Musical, at the King’s Head Theatre in 2016 & VAULT festival in 2018. He is a founding member of Working Birthday theatre company.

What I do:

As Participation Producer, I manage the PTC’s collaborative translation workshops, our UNDERTOW development programme, the Queer Digital Residency and the Radical Approaches Reading Group. I also produce our Dual Poetry Podcast. If you are interested in running a poetry translation workshop in your community, I am the person to talk to.

You can contact Bern at bern@poetrytranslation.org.

Ecre Karadag is a translator and marketer with an arts and community engagement background. She has an MA Translation degree from SOAS, University of London and most recently an MA in Japanese Studies from Sophia University, Tokyo. While studying in Tokyo, she was head of editorial and rights at The COMM, a multilingual Japanese street fashion magazine that has been recognised in Vogue, i-D, Glamour and the 2020 British Fashion Awards. As well as working at the PTC and as a Japanese-English translator, Ecre works at Fitzrovia Community Centre, supporting their fundraising, monitoring and evaluation and runs a weekly community poetry group.

What I do:

As Marketing and Communications Manager, I oversee the PTC’s communications strategy, social media accounts and website and work with our poets, translators and partners to promote our workshops, publications and events through digital campaigns. If you would like to discuss anything marketing, digital and promotion, please get in touch.

You can contact Ecre at ecre@poetrytranslation.org.

Sam Dodd has been a literature sector arts administrator for over a decade, coming to us with experience from The Poetry Society, First Story, Prison Reading Groups, Free Word, and English PEN. Sam is also a writing mentor for Arkbound specialising in working-class, queer and female voices, and a landworker at Spitalfields City Farm. She co-founded and then project managed intergenerational community engagement life writing project, CityLife Stories, from 2014 to 2024.

What I do:

As Operations Manager I look after the day-to-day operations of the PTC, including bookkeeping, banking, HMRC, HR, Companies House, Charity Commission, budgets and financial reports; systems, suppliers and services; and board/governance organisation and administration.

You can contact Sam at sam@poetrytranslation.org.

Mónica Ibarra Parle is Co-Executive Director of Forward Arts Foundation and Associate Director of El Nuevo Sol: British Latinx Writers. She was previously Executive Director of First Story, the young people’s writers’ development charity. She is on the Board of the World of Books Foundation, and she’s a fiction writer, having won the Mslexia 2022 Short Story Competition, and her work has been published in The Bridport Anthology 2024, Best Women’s Short Fiction 2022, The Bridport Anthology 2021, and Wasafiri.

Cecilia Rossi is Professor of Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, where she convenes the MA in Literary Translation and works for British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) as Postgraduate and Professional Liaison. Her latest translation, The Last Innocence and The Lost Adventures (Alejandra Pizarnik) published by Ugly Duckling Presse was shortlisted for the National Translation Awards for Poetry (ALTA) in 2020.

Matthew Beavers is Literature Relationship Manager at the British Council where he oversees literature programmes in the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the EU. He specialises in contemporary poetry, spoken word, and storytelling, and has managed international literature partnerships and skills development programmes on four continents. He initiated the LGBTQIA+ poetry exchange Language is a Queer Thing between India and the UK in 2022, and helped develop the project Unwritten Poems, which commissioned Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora poets to write new poems reflecting on the role of the Caribbean in WW1. From 2010 to 2015 he was project coordinator for the British Council Literature Seminar in Berlin, which has brought new literary voices from the UK to Germany for over 30 years. Before joining the British Council, Matt worked for the British Embassy in Berlin and taught English in Berlin and Vienna. He read European Studies and German at UEA Norwich.

Supriyo is an educator, entrepreneur and writer based in London. He is currently the Chief Executive Officer of e1133, an organisation that works with leading universities to prepare students for the Future of Work. Supriyo’s professional interests are in global higher education, particularly interdisciplinary education and the changing nature of work and careers. As part of his work, he has written extensively on education, economic empowerment and skill formation. His blog on the subject has over twenty thousand followers and got him invited to deliver workshops and programmes all over the world. Supriyo is a member of London’s South Asian diaspora and has played an active role in community organisation and served as the trustee of a leading diaspora think-tank. A collection of Supriyo’s poetry – Monsoonami – has recently been published in India by Paulsen Publishers.

Will Forrester is Head of Literature Programmes at English PEN. He edited All Walls Collapse: Stories of Separation (2022), led the editorial team for My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women (2022), and has been a judge for the TA First Translation Prize and the US National Translation Award. He is also a Director of Untold Narratives, an Independent Expert for Creative Europe, and a Trustee of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. He sits on the advisory boards of BookBrunch, Translator magazine, and Sinoist Books. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, London Magazine, and elsewhere.

Jennifer Lee Tsai is an award-winning poet, writer and artist. She was born in Bebington and grew up in Liverpool. She is a fellow of The Complete Works, a Ledbury Poetry Critic and a former Contributing Editor to Ambit. Her poetry and literary criticism are widely featured in publications including The Guardian, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Telegraph, TheTLS; The White Review as well as on BBC Radio 4. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets, Kismet (ignitionpress, 2019) and La Mystérique (Guillemot Press, 2022). Jennifer as received a Northern Writers Award for Poetry and is a winner of the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poets’ Prize. She has worked as a lecturer and teacher of English to students in universities and colleges as well as within community settings. She is the recipient of an AHRC doctoral scholarship in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool and an Artist in Residence at the Bluecoat. Her first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming with Bloodaxe in 2026.

Jorge Llorens has worked for more than 20 years in the finance sector, in London and Madrid. Throughout his career in investment and corporate banking, he has held senior management roles in international organizations such as Goldman Sachs, EBRD and BBVA, in areas such as Mergers & Acquisitions advisory and Client Coverage.

Jorge is also a Treasurer and Trustee at Voluntary Action Islington.

Bernie is a VCSE Systems & Governance Leader working closely with NHS Trusts, schools across the sectors and demographics, Non-Profits, the Criminal Justice System and Social Enterprises; a Changemaker and an Ambassador with the Institute for Economics and Peace; Chair, Governor and Trustee of several organisations and happy governance nerd. In a lifetime of working alongside people experiencing complex disadvantage or detriment, the value and impact of language has been a constant crucial thread. Challenging the status quo and supporting positive practice have been fundamental to how she firmly seeks to address co-existing inequality creatively and positively. Celebrating in the description, warmly intended as a compliment, of Fluffy Battleaxe she enjoys the opportunities to influence and impact that come her way, excited and awed to be part of this organisation. In a world that abuses and weaponises words, using them to explore and promote cultural partnerships is an act of gentle rebellion. Bernie likes gentle rebellion.

Bohdan Piasecki is a poet from Poland based in Birmingham. A committed performer, he has taken his poems from the upstairs room in an Eastbourne pub to the main stage of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, from underground Tokyo clubs to tramways in Paris, from a bookshop in Beijing to an airfield in Germany, from niche podcasts to BBC Radio. In the UK, he regularly features at the country’s most exciting spoken word nights, festivals, and readings. He enjoys the creative chaos of big field festivals just as much as the composed concentration of literary events.

Bohdan founded the first poetry slam in Poland before moving to the UK to get a doctorate in Translation Studies from the University of Warwick. He has worked as Director of Education on the Spoken Word in Education MA course at Goldsmiths University, and was the Midlands Producer for Apples and Snakes between 2010 and 2017. Since 2012, he has been a regular Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. He currently holds the post of Creative Producer at Beatfreeks.

Janet Remmington is a scholarly publisher, researcher, reviewer, and writer. She works as journals editorial director for the global Arts & Humanities programme and regional director for Africa at Routledge, Taylor & Francis. With two decades of publishing experience, she has pioneered interdisciplinary publications and partnership arrangements, and championed global South authorship and resource access. In her research capacity, Janet has published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on African literature, and she co-edited Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present, which won the 2018 Non-Fiction Prize from South Africa’s National Institute for Humanities and the Social Sciences. She is completing a cultural history of black South African travel texts for a PhD at the University of York. Janet has Masters degrees in English Literature (University of Cape Town), African Studies (University of Oxford), Creative Writing (Royal Holloway, University of London) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Studies in Publishing (Oxford Brookes). She has published creative non-fiction, poetry, and reviews in literary magazines, while facilitating creative exchanges and publication opportunities across borders.

Tatevik Sargsyan is a social change practitioner working on strategic development, design and delivery of social change programmes. In her previous roles at The Young Foundation and Design Council, she supported a range of social enterprises to deliver scalable social impact in the UK and worked across various social change initiatives including education and young people, arts and culture, mental health and financial inclusion. She has also worked with arts organisations and written for cultural magazines, including the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in London and Lisbon, where she developed The Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Series. She is interested in the civic role of the arts and developing narratives which bridge divides and act as a catalyst for social change. Tatevik is bilingual in Armenian and English, fluent in German and also studied Russian, Spanish and Portuguese. Currently, she is a Senior Designer at the RSA and Founding Editor of Anamot Press.

Niroshini Somasundaram is a poet and writer based in London. With a background in law, she currently works for a charity for children and young people.

Adam Feinstein is an acclaimed British author, poet, translator, Hispanist, journalist, film critic and autism researcher. His biography of the Nobel Prize-winning poet, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life, was first published by Bloomsbury in 2004 and reissued in an updated edition in 2013 (Harold Pinter called it ‘a masterpiece’). His book of translations from Neruda’s Canto General, with colour illustrations by the celebrated Brazilian artist, Ana Maria Pacheco, was published by Pratt Contemporary in 2013. He also wrote the introduction to the Folio Edition of Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths, which appeared in 2007. His own poems and his translations (of Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Mario Benedetti and others) have appeared in numerous magazines, including PN Review, Agenda, Acumen, Poem and Modern Poetry in Translation. His books on autism A History of Autism: Conversations with the Pioneers (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and Autism Works: A Guide to Successful Employment Across the Entire Spectrum (Routledge, 2018), were also widely praised. He broadcasts regularly for the BBC and writes for the Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. He has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.

Alice Kate Mullen is Manager of the Poetry Book Society. She read English Literature at Durham University. She has worked in poetry publishing since 2010 and was Marketing and Events Manager for Carcanet Press, Anvil and PN Review. She previously worked in bookselling and events co-ordinating at Waterstones and Shakespeare & Company, Paris, completed an Arts Council mentorship at Chicago’s Poetry Foundation in 2013 and was an Assistant Bibliotherapist at Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2016. In 2017 she co-founded the now annual Northern Poetry Symposium, a major state of the nation poetry summit at Sage, Gateshead.

Francisco Vilhena is assistant editor at Granta magazine. He writes short essays and translates from the Portuguese; his work can be found in Modern Poetry in Translation, clinic, Wasafiri, Brooklyn Rail, Granta and elsewhere. He has served as bridge translator on several PTC translation workshops. His cat is one of the first feline polyglots.

Furkan Çirkin is a poet, editor and academic. He received two bachelor’s degrees in law and philosophy, a master’s degree and a PhD from Istanbul University. He holds numerous prestigious poetry awards in Turkey. His poems have been published in many respected poetry journals, including Varlik, the oldest one, and translated into many languages, including French, Italian, Persian and Romanian. He has been publishing Yelkensiz Poetry Journal in Turkey since 2013. He has three poetry books: Nihilist Alarm, Ser/h, and  My Life: A Colourful Pitch-Dark. He translated Percy Bysshe Shelley’s book The Mask of Anarchy into Turkish. He is a PhD(c) for his second PhD and an assistant lecturer at the University of Essex, and currently lives in Colchester with his wife, curator and artist Hiromi Horiuchi.

Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a cross art form practitioner, a poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer and founder of the Midnight Run — an international, arts-filled, night-time, playful, urban, walking experience. He is a Complete Works poet alumni and a designer at White Space Creative Agency. Across his work, Identity, Displacement & Destiny are reoccurring themes in which he also tries to mix the old with the new: traditional African storytelling with contemporary poetry, pencil with pixel, texture with vector images. His poetry is published by Flipped Eye, Akashic, Nine Arches & several plays by Oberon.

Khánh Hạ is an aspiring producer, researcher, and maker from Đà Lạt, Việt Nam. With over six years of experience as a non-resident immigrant and more than four years of expertise in struggling to be a struggling artist, their creative practice seeks to recognise joy and wonder in the alien, the transitory, and the mundane. They have worked extensively with arts and cultural organisations in the UK, US and Việt Nam to develop socially engaged art projects and community programming despite insisting to be a non-people person. Khánh Hạ is currently based in London, where they recently finished their master’s in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy at Goldsmiths University of London.

Leo Boix is a Latino British poet, translator and journalist based in the UK. He has published two collections in Spanish, Un lugar propio (2015) and Mar de noche (2017), and was included in many anthologies, such as Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe) and Why Poetry? (Verve Poetry Press). His English poems have appeared in Poetry, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, PNReview, The Rialto, Litro, Magma, Brittle Star, Letras Libres, South Bank Poetry, The Morning Star, The Laurel Review and elsewhere. Boix is a fellow of The Complete Works Program and co-director of ‘Invisible Presence’, a scheme to nurture new young voices of Latino poets in the UK.

lisa minerva luxx is a British-Syrian writer and political activist. Their poetry, essays and fiction have been published internationally including by Poetry Review, Telegraph, New England Review, BBC Radio 4, Al Jazeera and their short film ‘Lesbian.’ was produced by Channel 4. In 2021 their debut collection, Fetch Your Mother’s Heart received critical acclaim. They are a platinum award-winning lyricist with Maison Arts, LA. They have written three verse plays including what the dog said to the harvest which premiered at Southbank Centre. Currently, studying their PhD in diaspora resistance poetics, they have also taught students at Columbia University (New York), American University of Beirut (Lebanon) and Queen Mary (London). In 2025 their short story collection, Raising the Sun, is set for release by Comma Press. luxx is a long-time grassroots organiser across England, Beirut and Syria. They believe in transnational community and direct action as a means of liberation. Their poetry has been translated into Arabic, Italian, French and German.

Naima Rashid is an author, poet and translator who works between Urdu, Punjabi, French and English. Her work has been long-listed for National Poetry Competition and Best Small Fictions. Her published translations include critically acclaimed translations of works by Ali Akbar Natiq (Naulakhi Kothi, Penguin India, 2023) and Perveen Shakir (Defiance of the Rose, Oxford University Press, 2019) and a joint translation from French (Chicanes, Les Fugitives, 2023). Her most recent work is a poetry collection, Sum of Worlds (Yoda Press, 2024). Her work and views have been widely published internationally including in Wild Court, Poetry Birmingham, The Scores and Asymptote. She has conducted translation and writing workshops with institutions including Shadow Heroes and Bristol Translates. At present, she is working on her own fiction and a series of translations.

Piero Toto (he/lui) is a bilingual poet, Italian translator and translation lecturer based in London. His work in translation pedagogy includes the monograph Queering Sexual Health Translation Pedagogy and the co-edited volume Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom. His English-language poems have appeared in Magma, Poetry London, fourteen poems, and the Muswell Press anthology Queer Life, Queer Love II, as well as in several other UK and international outlets. In his native Italy, Piero has published the poetry pamphlet tempo 4/4, and contributed to literary blogs Atelier and Laboratori Poesia, translating contemporary UK poetry into Italian. Additionally, he co-edits the multilingual poetry journal Atelier International.

Rachael Allen is the co-author of Jolene, a collaborative book of poems and photographs with Guy Gormley, and Nights of Poor Sleep, a book of paintings and poems with Marie Jacotey. Her first collection, Kingdomland, is published by Faber & Faber in 2019. She is the recipient of a Northern Writers Award and an Eric Gregory Award. She is the poetry editor for Granta, co-editor at the poetry press clinic and online journal tender.

Sarah Shin is a publisher and curator. She is a co-founder and director of Silver Press, a feminist publisher of books including Your Silence Will Not Protect You, a collection of Audre Lorde’s poetry, speeches and essays, and Ignota Books, an innovative press at the intersection of technology, myth-making and magic that launched with Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry co-edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás. She is the creator of New Suns: A Feminist Literary Festival, a bookfair and day of talks, screenings and workshops through the lens of mythology, held at the Barbican Centre in its inaugural year in 2018. She works at Verso Books.

Shamim Azad started her professional career as a journalist and teacher back in Bangladesh, her home country. She was interested in arts and literature and the celebration of creative initiatives right from her girlhood. Since 1970, she has been seriously writing short stories and poems. In 1990, she moved to the UK to teach at the primary level. She is now one of best-known Bengali poets in the UK. She has a deep passion and an interest in arts and literature, a commitment for enhancing cultural enrichment and an passion championing awareness for diversity. She believes that the celebration of literature is the best way to create harmony in this divisive, intolerant, conflicting world

Her poems and translations have appeared in magazines in Bangladesh, India, the UK and the USA, including The New Yorker. Azad received the ‘Bangla Academy Literary Award’ in poetry, the country’s highest literary award, the UK’s ‘National Lottery Award’. She was a Poet-in-Residence at ‘A Poet’s Agora’ in Athens, Greece. She has so far published nearly 40 books from various genres, including 13 collections of poetry.

Azad is a Trustee at Rich Mix, an Executive Council member of the Exiled Writers Ink, the Founder-Chair of theBSK, Bishow Shahitya Kendra (the World Literature Centre) London, the  Chair of BBPC, British Bilingual Poetry Collective CIC. She is the pioneer and initiator of r, a non-profit organization, Bijoyphool, Victory Flower, an intergenerational storytelling initiative for the liberation movement of Bangladesh independence. ShamimAzad, now retired, is a fulltime writer, living in London.

Sophie Stevens is a theatre researcher, translator and practitioner. She is Senior Lecturer in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of London, where she specialises in theatre and performance, creative-critical practice, activism and feminist translation approaches. She is a member of the Out of the Wings Collective and her translations have been presented at the Royal Court Theatre, Barons Court Theatre, Omnibus Theatre and Southwark Playhouse.

She has previously worked at the University of East Anglia, in collaboration with the British Centre for Literary Translation, and King’s College London on the AHRC-funded Language Acts and Worldmaking project. In 2025 she produced a new translation and critical introduction for The Methuen Drama Book of Contemporary Uruguayan Plays (Bloomsbury) which she co-edited with William Gregory. Her book Uruguayan Theatre in Translation: Theory and Practice was published by Legenda in 2022. She has also published in Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures and The Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review.

Tice Cin is a poet and writer from Tottenham, North London. Her work has been published in Skin Deep Magazine and commissioned by venues including St Paul’s Cathedral and Battersea Arts Centre. An alumnus of the poetry community Barbican Young Poets, she recently took part in the Barbican’s Art of Change series and is part of the centre’s Design Yourself collective. She is also a Literary Fiction awardee of Spread The Word’s London Writers Awards. A consultant with community project New Muslim Stories, she is passionate about helping marginalised voices reach their potential. Currently, she’s creating poetic sound portraits with composer Pietro Bardini highlighting the sonic beauty of linguistic and dialectical crossings.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared widely in journals including The Poetry Review, in addition to BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour. She is an Eric Gregory Award winner, and has held artist residencies in London, the USA and Brazil. Victoria is the director of MOTHER TONGUES, a poetry, film and translation project supported by Arts Council England and Autograph.