Sarah Maguire (1957-2017) was the founder of the Poetry Translation Centre and a champion of international poetry.
Sarah’s life wasn’t a straight line. She was adopted from an Irish mother and raised in the west London town of Northolt where she went to Notting Hill & Ealing High School, but she was, in her words, ‘eased out of formal education’ without any A levels to pursue her love of horticulture, becoming the first female Trainee Gardener with Ealing Council. There are still trees in Walpole Park in Ealing Broadway that she planted when she worked for the council. Before becoming a published poet, Sarah had a varied life—she worked for Release, now the oldest independent drugs charity in the world, and was a housing activist, occupying and squatting properties in the west of London.
Sarah quickly established herself as an original voice in British poetry. She published criticism before her first collection Spilled Milk was published in 1991 by Vintage. In 1994, Sarah Maguire was chosen as one of twenty of The Poetry Society’s New Generation Poets, along with Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie, and Don Paterson. She began to host and appear regularly on radio broadcasts for the BBC, such as Kaleidoscope, Night Waves, Poetry Please!, and Meridian. Three more critically acclaimed collections followed: The Invisible Mender, The Florist’s at Midnight, and The Pomegranates of Kandahar—all filled with her lyric poetry, both world-spanning and intimate.
The seeds of the PTC were planted in the 1990s when Sarah was the first poet to visit Palestine and Yemen for the British Council. It was here that Sarah’s passion for poetry translation was ignited by Arabic poetry. Later, describing this key moment in her life, she said, ‘When I arrived in Palestine and first encountered Palestinian poets, I became aware that it was in my power to do something important. Working with poets and translators to present translations in English of Palestinian poetry was possible, and there was hope that the influence of these translations would be far-reaching on readers of English.’
The Poetry Translation Centre started when Sarah was the Writer in Residence at SOAS and she began running workshops there to translate poetry from Asia, Africa and Latin America. After a year of working in this way, the first public reading was held on June 1st 2004. Listed in the running order are many poets, including Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, that we still work with today.
Later in life, Sarah edited two invaluable volumes of poetry reflecting her twin passions for plant life and poetry. FloraPoetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse is a collection of poems about plants, published by Chatto and Windus, where the poems are organised according to the biological categories of the plants they mention, and My Voice: A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre, published by Bloodaxe Books and the PTC, has poems arranged to describe an arc ‘from exile to ecstasy’.
Sadly, Sarah died on 2 November 2017 after a long struggle with cancer. Her legacy lives on through her own work as a poet. Her selected poems were published under the title Almost the Equinox by Chatto and Windus in 2015 and the ongoing work of the PTC.
The biannual Sarah Maguire Prize was established with the support of Sarah’s family and friends. Every two years the PTC awardsthe poet and translator of the best book of poetry in English translation by a living poet from beyond Europe as a way of celebrating Sarah’s passion for international poetry and work championing the art of translation.
After her death, the University of East Anglia accepted Sarah’s papers as part of the British Archive for Contemporary writing. The Archive contains material related to her life as a poet, her travels, journalism, criticism, and the foundation of the PTC. See the catalogue of material.
In smaller ways too her legacy can be found throughout the PTC. You can hear her voice on our early podcasts, and if you look through our online archive of poems many of the ‘About this translation’ notes were written by Sarah herself—so you can catch flashesof her insight and wit as she describes how the poems were reformed into English. Moreover, we continue to run workshops with the same collaborative approach and zealous love of poetry translation that inspired Sarah to found the PTC over two decades ago.