Autor/-in: Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi
Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi is one of the leading African poets writing in Arabic today. He has gained a wide audience in his native Sudan for his imaginative approach to poetry and for the delicacy and emotional frankness of his lyrics. His poetry has always been concerned with the rich cultural and linguistic diversity of Sudan and its complex history.
Saddiq was born in 1969 and grew up in Omdurman Khartoum where he lived until forced into exile in 2012. From 2006, he was the cultural editor of Al-Sudani newspaper until he was sacked from his position for political reasons (along with 22 other colleagues) in July 2012 during the uprising against the dictatorship of Omar Al-Bashir. Saddiq only escaped imprisonment because, thanks to the miraculous timing of Poetry Parnassus (the world's largest- ever gathering of international poets at which Saddiq represented Sudan), he was in the UK when a series of mass arrests took place. He successfully applied for asylum and is now living in London.
Bryar Bajalan is a writer, translator and filmmaker presently pursuing a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. His work as a translator from the Arabic and Kurdish has appeared in Ambit, Modern Poetry in Translation and on the Poetry Foundation website, and his present projects include the translation of poets displaced from Shingal during the Islamic State's genocide of the Êzîdî and the collection of oral histories in Mosul.
Poet, translator, and filmmaker Shook was raised in Mexico City. They earned a BA at the University of Oklahoma and an MSt at Oxford University. In their debut collection, Our Obsidian Tongues (Eyewear Publishing, 2013), Shook explores the violence and hunger of everyday life, steeping their poems in lush imagery and sensory detail. In 2013, they founded the nonprofit publishing house Phoneme Media, since editing over 30 books translated from 26 languages, including the first ever literary translations from Uyghur and Lingala. Shook has also translated over 15 books from Spanish and Isthmus Zapotec, including Mario Bellatin's The Large Glass: Three Autobiographies (Eyewear Publishing, 2014), Víctor Terán's The Spines of Love (Restless Books, 2014), and Jorge Eduardo Eielson's Room in Rome (Cardboard House Press, 2019), a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
