Two years after the first UK lockdown, writers Shamini Sriskandarajah and Elodie Barnes reflect on how the restrictions (and opportunities) of Covid-19 have altered and shaped their creative practices.
A secondhand book found in Paris takes Elodie Rose Barnes on a curious foray into the fantastical Studio Manassé, a portraiture business that specialised in glamorously surreal and, at times, problematic photographs of women.
In her fourth virtual dinner party of the series, Susanna Crossman talks to poets Elodie Rose Barnes, Nancy Campbell, Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Alina Stefanescu about poets as ‘wonder-workers’, poems as rafts and echoes, writing the life of Djuna Barnes, revisiting Tagore’s Gitanjali and much more.
Elodie Rose Barnes talks to author, performer and singer, Rosie Garland, about discovering the magic of words as a child, being an outsider, the importance of reading poetry out loud and the feminist gothic found in her novels.
Elodie Rose Barnes explores the epic English and Spanish poetry anthology, The Sea Needs No Ornament / El mar no necesita ornamento, and talks to its translators, Loretta Collins Klobah and Maria Grau Perejoan, about the translation process, empowering women writers from the Caribbean and the literary history behind the poems.
Elodie Rose Barnes reviews Sissal Kampmann’s Faroese poetry collection, Darkening/Myrking, and speaks to translator Marita Thomsen about translating Kampmann’s work, Faroese weather, gender in language, and reading translated texts.
In her third chapter of the series, Elodie Rose Barnes walks the streets of Paris trying to uncover fragments of Djuna Barnes’ relationship with Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and her attempt to write a biography of the Dada artist’s life.
In Annie McDermott’s superb translation of Selva Almada’s journalistic novel, Dead Girls, the story of three young women murdered in 1980s Argentina asks how long will the world stand by and remain silent about violence to women?
Ludovica Credendino remembers the difficulties of switching from Italian to English when writing creatively, and how she learned to fuse the two into her own unique language.
In Nora Nadjarian’s beautiful poem, ‘Letters to Parajanov’, a speaker awaits a bird’s return with news from her homeland and recalls words lost and gained in this new ‘country’.
