This July, join us for an early evening poetry reading at the Aga Khan Centre. Enjoy contemporary poetry created at recent creative workshops exploring translation, collaboration, and modern poetic forms.
The event will start with a set of poems written in the voices of the many different birds that appear in Attar of Nishapur’s poem The Conference of the Birds, written in twelfth-century Persia. These poems emerged from a workshop led by writer and translator Elhum Shakerifar, who explored the poem’s polyvocal core and its contemporary resonances.
Participants in April Yee’s ‘Nest Building’ workshop explored poetic forms, learning about the duplex, a brand new poetic form, created by US poet Jericho Brown, which was inspired by the 7th-century ghazal and 13th-century sonnet. They will share their own duplex poems that reflect their encounter with The Canticle of the Birds exhibition.
Then, award-winning poet Leo Boix will introduce some multilingual poems that emerged from his Birds in Many Tongues workshop, which explored translation and mis-translation to open up new creative possibilities. Finally, Leo will share some of his own poems inspired by birds and birdwatching.
The event is being run by the Poetry Translation Centre in collaboration with the Aga Khan Library and the Aga Khan Centre Gallery.
Bios
Leo Boix is a British Latinx poet and translator based in the UK. In 2019, he won the Keats-Shelley Prize for poetry. His second English language collection, Southernmost: Sonnets (Chatto & Windus, 2025), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. He is a fellow of The Complete Works Programme and co-director of Un Nuevo Sol, a scheme to nurture new young voices of Latinx poets in the UK.
Elhum Shakerifar is a London-based poet; she works with words and images — on the page, on screen and in translation. She sits on the PTC Advisory Board and translated the PEN Award winning, Warwick Prize-nominated Negative of a Group Photograph by Azita Ghahreman, alongside poet Maura Dooley (PTC / Bloodaxe Books, 2018). Elhum runs Hakawati (“storyteller” in Arabic) and collects hums.
April Yee is a writer and critic whose poetry, fiction, and essays have been named Best of the Net, two-time The Best American Essays Notable, and winner of the Manchester Fiction Prize and Ivan Juritz Prize. She has served as The Georgia Review’s editor-in-residence, Refugee Journalism Project mentor, and trustee at Spread the Word.
The Aga Khan Centre in London’s King’s Cross is a place for education, knowledge, cultural exchange and insight into Muslim civilisations. The organisations that are located here work together to bridge the gap in understanding about Muslim cultures and to connect the public to global development issues. The Aga Khan Centre hosts a variety of events, exhibitions and talks that are open to the public.
The Canticle of the Birds was a mixed-media exhibition that ran at The Aga Khan Centre in 2026, inspired by the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar, bringing together artists from the UK and beyond with artisans and young people in creative collaboration.
Aga Khan Centre
10 Handyside St,
London
N1C 4DN
