Lyra Poetry Festival's annual multilingual events showcase the power of poetry across different languages and cultures, with the poems being performed in both their original language and their English translated versions. This event, in partnership with the Poetry Translation Centre in its 20th year, will feature Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi with poet and friend Stephen Watts, Italian-Palestinian writer Sabrin Hasbun, Somali poet Ibrahim Hirsi, and Girasol Press reading the works of imprisoned Argentine poets.

The event will be BSL Interpreted.

The event is also available to watch via live stream. Please book a ‘Live Stream Ticket’ at checkout.

More about the poets:

Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi is one of the leading African poets writing in Arabic today. A distinguished journalist and one-time cultural editor of the Al-Sudani newspaper, Al-Raddi was forced into exile in 2012 and now lives in London. Al-Raddi's publications with the Poetry Translation Centre include He Tells Tales of Meroe: Poems for the Petrie Museum (2015), his selected poems, A Monkey at The Window (2016) and A Friend's Kitchen (2023).

Ibrahim Hirsi is a writer, independent researcher, and editorial assistant at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. He is currently working on a series of papers exploring the metrics and prosody of southern Somali poetic forms. Ibrahim has been published in The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, PBLJ and in the anthology Before Them, We (Flipped Eye, 2022).

Sabrin Hasbun believes in the extremely generative power of collective creation and action and her research focuses on collaborative practices to explore histories of marginalised groups. She has recently worked as writer, editor, translator, and trainer for several institutions around the world and published articles, both individual and collaborative, about collective creation in communities. She now works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff Met university, specialising in writing for and by marginalised groups. Wait for Her, Sabrin's family memoir about displacement told through the love shared between her Italian Mother and Palestinian father, has recently been shortlisted for the prestigious Footnote Press and Counterpoint Writing Prize

This event is taking place at Lyra Poetry Festival, Bristol, as part of the Poetry Translation Centre's 20th birthday celebrations.

Part of #LyraFest