Creative Writing & Translation Workshops

Translation is reading and translation is writing. It sounds simple enough, but in practice, how do literary translators engage with the original text and render it in another language? How can voice, rhythm and characterisation be translated – without smoothing out the quirks of the original text? In this hands-on workshop, open to all, we’ll dig into some of these questions and more.

We cannot ignore the times we are living in. To write now is to write in the midst of ongoing horrors, technological advancements and constant rolling news. Stories may offer escape but they also bear witness to the times we are living in. This generative workshop, filled with writing exercises, extracts from other writers and thoughts on how to bring the world as it is into the world we wish to create on the page, this workshop will help you to get through these times by documenting them in only the way you know how.

What makes a translation stand out from original writing? An interactive workshop on the joys of translation – for monolinguals and (budding) translators alike! Can you tell the difference between prose originally written in English and translated writing? Join us to put your reading skills to the test.

We’ll bring an artist-book ethos to creative writing in this playful, interactive workshop. Equipped with scissors, blank pages, ephemera and more, we’ll juxtapose disparate materials with the elegance of absence to try out new means of expression. Each participant comes away with a handmade book to expand beyond our time together. Taking strategies from conceptual art and literary translation, this workshop invites participants to discover writing as an act of shaping what we already have.

In this workshop, we will look at how to develop our unique writing voices by focusing on language, themes & content. Through a process of elimination, we’ll learn what it is we are trying to say with our writing and how best to say it. We’ll also work with prompts to showcase our personal strengths & style.

How much can you delete while still keeping a reader engaged? Explore the craft of suggestion and learn how things unnamed or unexplained can create mystery, depth and tension.  Indirectness and clue-dropping are valuable tools for a writer when deployed effectively. An interactive literary workshop on implication and ambiguity, open to writers at any stage.