Date: Thurs­day 22 April 2021 7pm GMT
Loca­tion: Zoom / online, with cap­tions pro­vid­ed by rev.ai
Price: free, with option­al dona­tions when book­ing via EventBrite

 Hier gehts zum Nach­hören der Lesung auf YouTube / Here is the reading!

Join us at 7pm (BST) on Thurs­day 22 April 2021 for the online launch of MPT ‘Clean Hands: Focus on the Pan­dem­ic in Europe’. We’ll be host­ing this launch in Zoom, and live cap­tion­ing will be pro­vid­ed by rev.ai.

MPT Edi­tor Clare Pol­lard will be joined remote­ly by Simone Atan­gana Bekono, Safiye Can, David Con­stan­tine, Mar­tin Kratz and David Colmer. Tune in for read­ings from the lat­est issue of MPT and a dis­cus­sion on poet­ry and the pandemic.

We’ll also be answer­ing your ques­tions on the night – so please email ques­tions in advance to webeditor@mptmagazine.com with ‘Clean Hands Pan­dem­ic Focus online launch’ in the sub­ject line. We’ll also try to accom­mo­date fur­ther ques­tions at the end of the event.

Tick­ets are free, but reg­is­tra­tion is nec­es­sary via EventBrite.

About the participants

Simone Atan­gana Bekono’s book hoe de eerste vonken zicht­baar waren, a col­lec­tion of poems and let­ters, won the Poëziede­bu­ut­pri­js Aan Zee prize for the best Dutch-lan­guage poet­ry debut, and she has won the pres­ti­gious Char­lotte Köh­ler Stipendi­um for new Dutch writ­ers. Her first nov­el is Con­frontaties (Lebows­ki, 2020). how the first sparks became vis­i­ble, trans­lat­ed by David Colmer, is out now with The Emma Press.

Safiye Can is a prizewin­ning poet, author, and lit­er­ary trans­la­tor from Offen­bach, Ger­many. She has pub­lished three best­selling col­lec­tions of poet­ry and trans­lates from Turk­ish into Ger­man. www.safiyecan.de

David Con­stan­tine, poet, trans­la­tor and nov­el­ist, has been award­ed the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poet­ry 2020.

Mar­tin Kratz’s most recent trans­la­tions from the Ger­man have appeared in The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthol­o­gy of Exile Lit­er­a­ture (Pushkin Press, 2019). He is the project man­ag­er at Man­ches­ter Poet­ry Library.

David Colmer trans­lates Dutch lit­er­a­ture. He has won a num­ber of trans­la­tion prizes, includ­ing the PEN Trans­la­tion Prize for his body of work and the David Reid Poet­ry Trans­la­tion Prize ( four times ).

About MPT ‘Clean Hands: Focus on the Pandemic in Europe’

MPT’s spring issue ‘Clean Hands’ focus­es on the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic in Europe, fea­tur­ing the Stanza/MPT Win­dowswap Project; a con­ver­sa­tion between Simone Atan­gana Bekono and Jay Bernard about the lan­guage of lock­down; and new poems and trans­la­tions from across the con­ti­nent includ­ing Jan Wag­n­er, Stel­la N’Djoku, David Harsent, Safiye Can, David Con­stan­tine, Agnes Agboton, and many more. Also: an intro­duc­tion to Uyghur poet­ry curat­ed by Munawwar Abdul­la, Naush Sabah’s ver­sion of ‘Qasi­da Bur­da’, and cli­mate change poems by Mar­i­on Poschmann, trans­lat­ed by Jen Calle­ja. All this and more in the ground­break­ing mag­a­zine ded­i­cat­ed to poet­ry in trans­la­tion: for the best in world poet­ry read MPT.