I’m reading in Oxford with @oliviamcc.bsky.social on 13 May. Please come along – it’s a free poetry event but you need to sign up: www.ticketsource.com/queens-trans...

my latest books cartoon for @theguardian.com

I’m doing a reading and discussion in June in Berlin with my brilliant friend Olga Radetzkaja: www.hausfuerpoesie.org/de/programm/...

Lots on and a few amends! 🙂

Tonight! With Phoebe Giannisi, Brian Sneeden, Kostya Tsolakis & Calliope Michail. It's officially a launch party, though this issue sold out a long time ago. However, we have kept a few copies for this eve – so if you'd like to buy one, this is your chance! helleniccentre.org/event/modern...

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

Don't miss this chance to hear 3 brilliant writers discuss how they write about Ukraine in wartime! Join Yuliya Musakovska, Myroslav Laiuk & Luke Harding next Tuesday at UCL, details: www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanit.... @uclssees.bsky.social @ukrinstitute.bsky.social @lukeharding1968.bsky.social

In which I talk with the delightful @gregorykearns.bsky.social about stealing books, a railway childhood, translation and the soul’s mobility…. @carcanet.bsky.social

A new episode of The Poems We Made Along The Way is live! In my conversation with @sashadugdale.bsky.social we covered her @carcanet.bsky.social collection The Strongbox, working in translation, and how important research is to Sasha. Listen wherever good podcasts can be heard.

Who would have thought my shriveled heart Could have recovered greenness? It was gone Quite underground; as flowers depart To see their mother-root, when they have blown

This is such an exciting prospect. I really enjoyed reading Djabbarova and am very happy anglophone readers will get to know her work in Lisa’s translations.

Submissions for the 2026 Barbellion Prize are open! The Barbellion Prize celebrates & promotes writing that represents the experience of chronic illness & disability. Subs open 2nd April-1st September, 2026. Judges: Penny Pepper, Dr David Bolt & Letty McHugh. Full details: barbellionprize.org

Couldn't help myself. Chichester Cathedral, September 2021. The painting was so far away sadly, hence the poor quality.

Looking forward to a nightingale-inflected reading at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome next week with @sashadugdale.bsky.social You can book here ksh.roma.it/events/poetr... or why not listen anyway to Sasha’s essay On Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale #keats #poetry www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

RIP English writer Virginia Woolf, died this day 1941. “No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.” “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

Thank you @notjustdancing.bsky.social I so appreciate this as I mostly forget it exists!

Posting this to make everyone jealous really but I will be reading with @notjustdancing.bsky.social on Thursday 2 April at the wonderful Keats-Shelley House in Rome. ksh.roma.it/events/poetr...

The most anguished worrit lurcher

Painting created 1974, in the art therapy studio at Netherne hospital, Surrey, by an individual who was compelled to live there, currently identified to us only as Francesca.

Introducing the One-day Subscription to PN Review. Want to have a rummage around our poetry archive? Get 24 hours' access for £3.50 to start your journey into PNR. Follow the link below, and scroll down to One-day All Access':🔗 www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/merc...

such a beautiful, tiny painting on glass, backed with silver paper from a cigarette packet Dora Carrington ‘The Barque Harmony in the Ice off the Labrador Coast’, 1929

Long nose Sunday

Natalka Vorozhbit’s hugely ambitious and operatic play about the Ukrainian Holodomor ’The Grainstore’ premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2009. It included puppetry, singing, dancing, tragedy and wonderfully funny scenes. It so so deserves to be revived. No one writes like her.

This was my country and it may be yet, But something flew between me and the sun. From ‘The Resignation’ by Edmund Blunden

Just received a hand bound edition of Pupa by J O Morgan with a sumptuous printed cover. I am looking forward to re-reading this wonderful book about transformation and transgression.

From the archive: Crow’s Eye View by Yi Sang, translated from Korean by Jack Jung Selected by poet, translator and former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, @sashadugdale.bsky.social modernpoetryintranslation.com/from-the-arc...

An astonishingly beautiful edition of Pupa, the novel by J O Morgan, designed and halfbound in cloth with hand-printed paper sides by the author, whose stylised name appears on the insert, like... well, like a pupa. One of only ten copies (mine is number 6). It gives off a steady glow, and low hum.

This is going to be extraordinary, poetry peeps. See you there!

Maria Stepanova & Sasha Dugdale with Sophie Pinkham!! I loved this book & I’m looking forward to this virtual event next weekend. Register here: www.eventbrite.com/e/transnatio...

Some great reviews of Ukraine Unbroken @arcolatheatre.bsky.social in the press (and lots that mention Natalya Vorozhbit’s Three Mates as outstanding). A couple of weeks left to see the show.

Read an excerpt of THE DISAPPEARING ACT (@bookhugpress.bsky.social) by Maria Stepanova (translated by Sasha Dugdale), and take a closer look at this spellbinding novel-in-translation! #AmReading #Novel #Translation #Fiction open-book.ca/News/Read-an...

17B Kingsland Road Shoreditch 5-12 March 🌸🌸🌸

I have two poems in the new @pnreview.bsky.social 288. One is a Propertius (via Grigory Dashevsky). You can read it here: www.pnreview.co.uk/archive/two-...

Publication day for @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social edition of The Disappearing Act, a beautiful reflection on grief and identity in a time of conflict by Maria Stepanova.

On 3 March Maxine Peake is reading @oliviamcc.bsky.social wonderful version of Beauty and the Beast at Hay Castle as part of a celebration of illustrator Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Tickets for ‘Redefining Beauty’ via www.haycastletrust.org/m-1-hay-cast...

Heart looking backwards with the fading of the witch hazel and forward with the crazy bloomin daffs

‘My own personal choice is to continue writing – simply because that is the only thing I can do to counterbalance the distortion. Someone has to use Russian as a language of love’ - Maria Stepanova on Disappearing Act @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social shop.pushkinhouse.org/blogs/booksh...

Natalia Vorozhbit’s Three Mates is part of Ukraine Unbroken at the Arcola opening next week. This short play looks at survivor guilt, shame and conscription in Ukraine and it’s compassionate, funny & human: www.arcolatheatre.com/event/ukrain...

The birds have been so loud these last few dawnbreaks they must know something

If you’d like to hear Maria Stepanova and me talk about The Disappearing Act you could sign up for this online conversation: 21 March 12pm EST / 5pm GMT brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2026-0...

Stepanova’s The Disappearing Act treats exile as a moral condition, not an escape but a reckoning. Spare, haunting prose on Russian guilt, language, and complicity, where forgetting is just another crime and disappearance isn’t innocence.

The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova review – a poetic exploration of Russian guilt

There is a link in the @rferl.org.web.brid.gy article to the online museum of Ukrainian artefacts currently in safe storage and/or inaccessible to the public.

And that is in truth what I never quite say: Those trashed slopes are home to the foxglove An ancient restorer of the heart’s beat, my love. (My only Valentine’s poem is here for anyone who prefers them unsweetened) poets.org/poem/valenti...

‘For me, Erato and Hôtel Amour […] take us to a place somewhere close to where Eliot takes us in Four Quartets.’ From a sustained & thoughtful review of @notjustdancing.bsky.social recent @serenbooks.bsky.social collection Hotel Amour: woodbeepoet.com

This book meant a huge amount to me when I first read it as a young mother – and now, as a carer for different generations, it continues to resound.

This is the most delightful book! Danny Hahn takes the reader through Shakespeare’s many translations (en route telling you a great deal about plays) in a generous, personal & extremely readable way. I love his footnotes (an apology to his editor for the lateness of ms - he was counting syllables…)

Deep and everlasting regret I didn’t just abscond to Florence to see this in January. Who needs dry when you can drink Beato Angelico… www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

@sofkazinovieff.bsky.social on my Willow walk recently. Happy memories!