Carcanet Press brings discussion around translation and poetry to the Portico Library, focusing on modernist poets, politics and aesthetics.

£3 plus eventbrite booking fee here.

North American poets Geoffrey Brock and Evan Jones (translators of Ungaretti, and Cavafy, respectively), will talk about their work as translators, and why we remain so interested in the work of early twentieth-century poets. They will be joined by Prof Francesca Billiani, whose critical work deals with Modernism, translation, and the cross-over of politics and aesthetics.

This event will be chaired by poet, publisher and translator, John McAuliffe

Francesca Billiani is Professor of Italian at the University of Manchester where she teaches contemporary Italian literature and culture. Her research focuses on the Fascist period, censorship, literary journals, modernism, history of publishing, and intellectual history. She is the author of, among other things, a monograph on the politics of translation in Italy (Culture nazionali e narrazioni straniere, Italia 1903-1943) and, most recently, a monograph Fascist Modernism in Italy. Arts and Regimes (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2021).

Geoffrey Brock (@gbrock) is the author of three volumes of poetry, the editor of The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of numerous books of various genres, most recently Giovanni Pascoli's Last Dream, which received the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 2020, and Giuseppe Ungaretti's Allegria, which received the National Translation Award for Poetry from the American Literary Translators Association in 2021. Currently a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, he teaches at the University of Arkansas.

Canadian poet Evan Jones (@EvanPJones) has lived in Manchester since 2005. His most recent collection of poetry is Later Emperors (Carcanet 2020). His translation of C.P. Cavafy, The Barbarians Arrive Today (Carcanet 2020), was a TLS Book of the Year.

JOHN MCAULIFFE (Associate Publisher and Editor) grew up in Listowel, County Kerry, and has lived in the UK since 2002. He has published five collections with The Gallery Press, most recently The Kabul Olympics, which was published in April 2020. His Selected Poems will be published in October by Gallery and by Wake Forest University Press in the US in 2022. John now lives in Manchester, where he is Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing and edits The Manchester Review. He wrote the regular poetry column in The Irish Times from 2013-2020 and, since 2020, has worked as Associate Publisher and editor at Carcanet Press.