Join multilingual writers Vanni Bianconi, Xiaolu Guo and Bohdan Piasecki for a discussion about linguistic mixing and matching, identifying (or not) with a language and self-translation. If you have one, please bring along your own favourite foreign word – we will think about the stories those words tell.
Free Word’s Translator in Residence programme 2015-16 is supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation.
Xiaolu Guo has published several books in Chinese including essay collections, short stories and film theories. After moving to the UK in 2002, she began to write in English and published 6 books with Random House, including A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers which has been translated into 27 languages. Her most recent novel, I Am China, was longlisted for the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her novelistic memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, is due to be published in February 2017 by Chatto & Windus.
Bohdan Piasecki is a Polish poet based in Birmingham, UK. He has taken his poems to venues ranging from the upstairs room in an Eastbourne pub to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre; from an underground Tokyo club to a tramway in Paris; from a bookshop in Beijing to an airfield in Germany. In the UK, he regularly features at exciting spoken word nights, festivals, and readings. Bohdan actively seeks out collaboration opportunities with other artists; he is currently working on Palimpsest City, a digital/live project using a virtual metropolis as an anthology for spoken poetry.
Thursday, 29 September 2016, 6:45pm – 8:30pm, Free Word Centre
Tickets available here.