Poems: Corsino Fortes

Corsino Fortes (1933-2015) was born on Cape Verde's São Vicente Island. Poet, activist, educator, lawyer and diplomat, Fortes was Cape Verde's ambassador to both Portugal and Angola, and served as a judge in Angola. Writing in both Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese, Fortes was as interested in poetic form and sonic possibility as he was in the cultural identity, history, and movements of the Cape Verdean archipelago. His first collection, Pão & Fonema (Bread & Phoneme), was published to great acclaim in 1974, the year of the collapse of the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, which led to the decolonisation of Cape Verde and other African colonies in 1975. Throughout his career Corsino Fortes's poems offer vivid and often hallucinatory glimpses of the land, sea and people of his country - word-scapes rooted in the earth and the body. Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor, and translator with around a hundred books to his name. His work includes translations from Europe, Africa, and the Americas (encompassing fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and plays), and a number of nonfiction books, including The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. He has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Blue Peter Book Award and been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, among many others. He is the winner of the 2023 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. Sean O’Brien is a poet, critic, editor, translator, playwright, broadcaster and novelist. His poetry has won multiple awards, including the T S Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize (three times), and the E M Forster Award. His eighth poetry collection, The Beautiful Librarians, won the 2015 Roehampton Poetry Prize. His second novel, Once Again Assembled Here, was published in 2016, as was Hammersmith, a chapbook of poetry and photographs. 2018 saw the publication of his ninth collection of poetry, Europa, and his second collection of short stories from Comma Press, Quartier Perdu. Born in London, Sean O’Brien grew up in Hull and now lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.