Sasha Dugdale – författare

Centres of Cataclysm celebrates the fifty-year history of Modern Poetry in Translation, one of the world’s most innovative and exciting poetry magazines. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, MPT has constantly introduced courageous and revolutionary poets of the 20th and 21st century to English-speaking readers. Ted Hughes thought of MPT as an ‘airport for incoming translations’ - from the whole world, across frontiers of space and time. These are poems we cannot do without. The anthology is not arranged chronologically but, from a variety of perspectives, it addresses half a century of war, oppression, revolution, hope and survival. In so doing, it truthfully says and vigorously defends the human. In among the poems are illuminating letters, essays and notes on the poets, on the world in which they lived and on the enterprise of translating them.

Centres of Cataclysm celebrates the fifty-year history of Modern Poetry in Translation, one of the world’s most innovative and exciting poetry magazines. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, MPT has constantly introduced courageous and revolutionary poets of the 20th and 21st century to English-speaking readers. Ted Hughes thought of MPT as an ‘airport for incoming translations’ - from the whole world, across frontiers of space and time. These are poems we cannot do without. The anthology is not arranged chronologically but, from a variety of perspectives, it addresses half a century of war, oppression, revolution, hope and survival. In so doing, it truthfully says and vigorously defends the human. In among the poems are illuminating letters, essays and notes on the poets, on the world in which they lived and on the enterprise of translating them. ‘MPT seeks a real diversity of voices: women and men equally, different centuries, countries, races, creeds, languages, cultures, ideas. The very essence of the founding principle was: Your view is not the only one.'' - David & Helen Constantine ‘The burning heart of cataclysm at the centre of the anthology is drawn out; through translation, migration and exile, it is transplanted into another soil. The word spoken under duress becomes a word of affirmation: a protection and a stating of our own humanity.'' - Sasha Dugdale ‘MPT is the Fifth International, anyone who wants to change the world and see it changed should join.’ - John Berger

Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Winter Choice Award. Contains the poem 'Joy' - Winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Sasha Dugdale’s fourth Carcanet collection, Joy, features the poem of that title which received the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. ‘Joy’ is a monologue in the voice of William Blake’s wife Catherine, exploring the creative partnership between the artist and his wife, and the nature of female creativity. The Forward judges called it ‘an extraordinarily sustained visionary piece of writing’.The poems in Joy mark a new departure for Dugdale, who expresses in poetry a hitherto ‘silent’ dialogue which she began as an editor of Modern Poetry in Translation with writers such as Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Maria Stepanova and Svetlana Alexeivich. Dugdale combines an open interest in the historical fate of women and in the treacherous fictional shaping of history. In the abundant, complex and not always easy range of voices in Joy she attempts to redress the linear nature of remembrance and history and restore the ‘maligned and misaligned’.

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize 2021. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020. Deformations includes two large-scale works related in their preoccupation with biographical and mythical narrative. 'Welfare Handbook' explores the life and art of Eric Gill, the well-known English letter cutter, sculptor and cultural figure, who is known to have sexually abused his daughters. The poem draws on material from Gill's letters, diaries, notes and essays as part of a lyrical exploration of the conjunction between aesthetics, subjectivity and violence. 'Pitysad' is a series of simultaneously occurring fragments composed around themes and characters from Homer's Odyssey. It considers how trauma is disguised and deformed through myth and art. Acting as a bridge between these two works is a series of individual poems on the creation and destruction of cultural and mythical conventions.

Winner of the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2025Shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize 2025'It began with the sunappearing over the plane wingsupernatural orangebut no light'The Strongbox opens with the abduction of a woman to a foreign land and ends with the Rape of Europa.Drawing in elements of Greek mythology, epic literature and recent history, this protean work gives shape to a cast of characters both ancient and modern, as they flit in and out of tales, their voices overlapping and interacting.An unnamed girl is persuaded to leave behind her country and her childhood and travel to a warzone. Helen of Sparta, already trapped behind the walls of Ilium, is plagued by dreams about the coming conflict. Gods continue their manipulations, while mortals persist in defying the will of their gods.Through a series of interconnected scenes and dialogues this singularwork traces the role of myth in shaping our accounts of both history and contemporary events.

MPT's new look Spring issue Strange Tracks focuses on Dutch poetry, with a selection of new poems by three of the Netherlands most exciting poets: Toon Tellegen, Ester Naomi Perquin and Menno Wigman and an interview with Tellegen and his English translator Judith Wilkinson about their prize-winning collaboration Raptors. The issue also features poems from around the world: Zhang Zao, Luis Felipe Fabre's poems about the drug wars in Mexico, Argentinian poet Fabian Casas and French poet Valerie Rouzeau. There are also new translations of Baudelaire by Australian poet Jan Owen and some fresh new versions of poems and riddles from The Exeter Book. We're also launching a new design for MPT and some commissioned cover artwork. For the best in world poetry read MPT.

'The Constellation' is the special 'Poetry International Festival' issue of Modern Poetry in Translation. The magazine focusses on the powerful and moving exchange of poems and letters between Bertolt Brecht and his lover and collaborator Margarete Steffin as they went through exile, war and loss. These new translations are by acclaimed translator and poet David Constantine. The issue also features new poems by Christine Marendon and Nikola Madzirov who are both appearing at the Poetry International Festival at London's Southbank Centre, and responses to Rilke's poetry by Patrick McGuiness, Sujata Bhatt and Durs Grunbein. Raw new poems from Iran, poetry from China, Somalia and Turkey and translations by John Berger of his son Yves Berger's French poetry are just a few of the many highlights.