The Winchester Poetry Festival World Voices series continues to bring the very best in translated poetry to Winchester. Join Maura Dooley, Azita Ghahreman, Golan Haji, Nikola Madzirov and Stephen Watts for an afternoon of international poetry at the Winchester Discovery Centre.

Azita Ghahreman is the author of five collections of poetry, Eve’s Songs (1991), Sculptures of Autumn (1995), Forgetfulness is a Simple Ritual (2002), The Suburb of Crows (2008) and Under Hypnosis in Dr Caligan’s Cabinet (2012). In 2013 she was a recipient of Swedish PEN’s Prince Wilhelm Award. Russian and Ukrainian translations of her poems were awarded the Udmurtia Russian Academy’s Ludvig Nobel Prize in 2014. She was born in Mashhad in 1962 and has lived and worked in Sweden since 2006.

Maura Dooley’s most recent poetry collections is The Silvering (2016). Her work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize and received both an Eric Gregory and a Cholmondley Award. She teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Golan Haji is a Syrian poet and translator. He studied medicine at the University of Damascus. He has worked as a translator from English and American literature and has translated Robert Louis Stevenson's Scottish classic Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into Arabic. His first collection of poetry in Arabic, Called in Darkness (2004), won the Al-Maghut prize in poetry.

Nikola Madzirov is a Macedonian poet, editor, and translator. He was born in Strumica to a family of Balkan War refugees. Madzirov’s poetry examines both personal and cultural geography in order to trace the nature of our movement across those landscapes. He is the author of several collections of poetry including the Huberta Burda Award-winner Relocated Stone (2007).

Stephen Watts is a poet, translator and editor. His previous works include The Lava's Curl (1990), Gramsci & Caruso (2003), The Blue Bag (2004), Mountain Language (2008) and Journey Across Breath (2011). Well respected as a translator, particularly of poets living in exile, his own work has been translated into many languages and valued beyond his mother tongue.