Iranian poet Farzaneh Ghavami writes poetry that looks explicitly at women's experiences under a repressive government, a topic given extra weight by the recent suppression of the Women's uprising in Iran . The translator for this session is the award winning poet and transator Alireza Abiz, who has worked for over a decade with the PTC, translting peots from Iran and Afghanistan.

The Poet

Farzaneh Ghavami, b.1968, is a graduate of Persian Language and Literature and teaches Persian literature in Tehran high schools. Her poetry reflects her lived experience as a woman living and working under a dictatorship system that suppresses women and femininity. It is due to this situation that Farzaneh Ghavami, like many other Iranian contemporary female poets, uses her personal life to make political statements. In her poetry, a first person female narrator is in a permanent dialogue with a fictional beloved and it is through this dialogue that she absorbs the world. She uses her body and her lyrical conversations as a platform to make social and political statements about the contemporary socio-political situation in Iran.

The Translator

Alireza Abiz is an Iranian poet, literary critic and translator. Abiz has written extensively on Persian contemporary literature and culture. His scholarly book Censorship of Literature in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Politics and Culture since 1979 was oublished by I. B. Tauris. He has so far published five collections of poetry in Persian: Stop! We must get off, Spaghetti with Mexican Sauce, I can hear a tree from my desk, 13/1 Koohsangi Street, and Black Line- London Underground. Abiz is an award-winning translator and has translated some leading English language poets including W.B. Yeats, Ted Hughes, Basil Bunting, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg and C.K. Williams into Persian.

The Facilitator

The workshops will be led by award-winning poet and translator Leo Boix, an Argentine-British poet, translator and journalist based in the UK. He is the author of an English collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto & Windus, 2021) and two Spanish collections, Un lugarpropio (2015) and Mar de noche (2017). He co-directs Invisible Presence, a scheme to nurture young Latinx poets in the UK. Boix received the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize Award in 2018 and the Keats-Shelly Prize in 2019.

Our workshops are open to all - there is no need to know the original language. Simply join in.

The Poetry Translation Centre makes the translation process open to all. YOu don't need to have any previous language skills or trabnslation experience. The guest translator will provide a simple guide translation for the group to work from, going line by line until we have a new vertion that woeks as a living poem in English.

It is a wonderful opportunity to look closely at a poem from another culture and participants discover new aspects of language, develop their translating skills and have an opportunity to share their love of poetry with people all around the world.

Season Passes

Save money with a season pass. At £56.00 for full price or £35.00 concession, a Season Pass of our Autumn workshops season you save 12.5% on the price of four individual tickets. Plus for every workshop you attend, you earn loyalty points towards free PTC publications.

Get your Season Pass here.