Mapping the City: Nisrine Mbarki

MAPPING THE CITY – EUROPEAN WRITERS IN LONDON 14th May, 18:00 – 20:00

Europe House, 32 Smith Square, London, SW1P 3EU

For centuries, writers have come to London from across Europe, to live or visit. Their encounters with the city leave a mark: on the writer, on their work and often on London itself. To honour and record their presence, University College London (UCL) has created a unique digital map, Lost and Found: A European Literary Map of London. The map highlights the impact of past writers on the city and invites living writers to contribute and reflect on London as a destination and place where people, languages, literatures and cultures meet and are transformed.

To mark UCL’s 2025 European Literary Map of London Writer in Residence, this special night of stories, insights and global voices features this year’s selected writer, Ireland’s Ciara Broderick, alongside three of the shortlisted writers, Nisrine Mbarki from the Netherlands, Domas Raibys from Lithuania and Iryna Shuvalova from Ukraine. These four writers, for whom sense of place is integral to their writing, will read from their work and discuss their relationship with London as a city of literature and cultural exchange, as well as how they propose to make their own mark on the European Literary Map of London. Which languages and literatures have had the greatest impact on London’s literary life, which are missing and why? How do contemporary writers view their European literary forebears and their influence on London? And does London still have the draw it once had for Europe’s writers?

More information about the event and the project here.

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Nisrine Mbarki is an Amsterdam-based multilingual versatile poet, feminist, writer, curator and literary translator. Her literary work covers different genres like poetry, short stories and theatre. As a literary translator she translates poetry from Arabic and English into Dutch. As a curator she works for different international literary festivals and is member of several literary juries and boards in the Netherlands. In January 2022 she published her poetry oeverloos (shoreless) debut for which she was nominated for the C.Buddingh price, a prize for the best Dutch debut of the year, and for the Herman De Konickprijs, a prize for the best Belgian and Dutch poetry collection of the year.

Photo of Nisrine Mbarki by Bart Grietens