A dual language English & Portuguese poetry reading with Brazilian poet, activist and artist Adelaide Ivánova and her translator Rachel Long, in celebration of the release of Adelaide's chapbook the hammer and other poems published by the Poetry Translation Centre.

Ivánova’s award-winning collection work explores the slippery, politically fraught concepts of rape, adultery, trauma and power, ultimately tracing a path of psychic survival through verse. Her poetry nails its bold proclamations to the forehead of a rape culture both literary and very real, writing through a thousand silences and shattering the false transparencies of the law. Beyond this and despite a universe of oppressions, Adelaide Ivánova also manages to create a space for real intimacy between lovers. A hammer is a weapon, she reminds us, but also a tool. You can tear it all down and then build something.

Adelaide and Rachel's readings will be supported by international and locally-based poets TBC.

Free, ticketed. Readings will be in both English and Portuguese.

Adelaide Ivánova was born in 1982 in Recife, Brazil. She is a journalist, political activist, and community organizer, moving among poetry, photography, translation, and publishing. Her first two books are autonomy (2014) and Polaróides (2014). Her first poetry collection, O Martelo (The Hammer) won the Rio de Janeiro Poetry Prize in 2018. Her writing, translations, and photographs have been published widely in journals such as i-D, The Huffington Post, Vogue, and Marie Claire. She edits the anarcha-feminist zine “MAIS PORNÔ, PVFR!”. She lives between Cologne and Berlin. A chapbook of Adelaide’s work selected from O Martelo (The Hammer), translated by poet Rachel Long, will be published by the Poetry Translation Centre in May 2019. Website.

Rachel Long is a poet and the founder of Octavia – Poetry Collective for Women of Colour, which is housed at Southbank Centre, London. She was shortlisted for Young Poet for Laureate for London in 2014 and awarded a Jerwood/Arvon Foundation mentorship in 2015. Rachel has run poetry workshops for The Poetry School, The Serpentine Galleries and at University of Oxford. She is Assistant Tutor to Jacob Sam La-Rose on the Barbican Young Poets programme 2015-present. Website.

Presented in partnership with Originalprojects and the National Centre for Writing.