Motivation

"Bringing up two small children in a time of rapidly accelerating ecological crisis led me to entirely rethink the role and purpose of my writing and translating practice. What future for children, what poetry for their future, when ‘every instant, every cell, is the site of the Anthropocene Crisis’ (Joyelle McSweeney)? I have spent the past decade experimenting and searching for new poetic forms and languages that speak to and express the tangled crises of our moment."

BACKGROUND

Poetry: Olivia McCannon’s poetry collection Exactly My Own Length (Carcanet) won the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Beauty and Beast, a collaboration with the artist Clive-Hicks Jenkins, appears winter 2021 (Design for Today). A further collection, The Archives of Z, is forthcoming

Translation: During the past decade, I have translated and advocated for fearless poetry by women writers such as Marie de France, Louise Labé, the communarde Louise Michel, Ariane Dreyfus, Louky Bersianik, and ex-Surrealist Gisèle Prassinos. Previous translations include contemporary plays for the Royal Court Theatre (London) residencies, and a Balzac novel, Old Man Goriot (Penguin Classics).

INTERESTS/RESEARCH

My AHRC-funded doctoral research investigates ‘the renewable energies of poetry and translation’. If poetry is a resource, who owns it? On what terms can reading, writing and translating poems be considered ‘arts of living on a damaged planet’ (Tsing et al., 2018)?

Some of my recent critical writing appears here (Links are underlined):

“Où est le centre du monde?” Marie Darrieussecq’s Tristes Pontiques: Movable Centers and Migrations of Being Article for L’Esprit Créateur, 60:3 (2020) Fall

‘On Translation’, for The Queen’s College (Oxford) Translation Exchange blog, July 2021

‘The Defence of Poetry: ownership and the co-operating mind’, for the NCLA New Defences of Poetry project, July 2021