Instituto Cervantes Manchester and Leeds Poetry Club, under the coordination of Professor Diana Cullell (University of Liverpool), is launching a new series of readings dedicated to “Spanish Poetry Awards”.

This club provides our students with the opportunity to explore prominent figures in contemporary Spanish poetry, such as Joan Margarit, María Victoria Atienza, Carlos Marzal, or Luis García Montero.

In each session, participants will delve into the work of a poet through the reading of their poems, presented in both Spanish and English. Professor Cullell will enhance the experience with her commentary, creating a participatory space where all attendees will share their insights about the meaning of the poems.

The second session will focus on the work of Luis García Montero, distinguished with the International Poetry Prize of the Loewe Foundation in 1993, the Spanish National Poetry Prize in 1995, and the Spanish National Critic Prize in 2003, among other awards. García Montero represents the lyrical tendency called “new sentimentality” with a vast poetic oeuvre spanning from the eighties to the present day, with works such as El jardín extranjero, Égloga de los dos rascacielos, Las flores del frío, Luna en el sur, or Habitaciones separadas.
Also, in this session, we will once again have the participation of the translator Anna Crowe, who is currently working on translating poems into English by Luis García Montero.

Join us to explore and share the richness of Spanish poetry in this fascinating literary journey!

About the Speakers
Diana Cullell is a Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool and a Spanish and Catalan literature and culture specialist. She has published on different authors and literary movements, interested in new forms of poetry and their new interpretations; contemporary Spanish and Catalan poetry; and representations of the body in literature or the Spanish poetry market from 1980 to the present. Her publications include La perfopoesía española en el siglo XXI: una revolución poética (Madrid: Amargord, 2019); Spanish Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology(Manchester University Press, 2014); or La Poesía de la Experiencia Española de Finales del Siglo XX al XXI (Madrid: Devenir, 2010).

Anna Crowe (b. Plymouth 1945) is a poet and internationally recognised translator. In 1998 she co-founded StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, was Artistic Director for the first seven years, and now serves as Honorary President on the Board of Trustees.

Her work has been recorded for the Poetry Archive and translated into several languages. She was twice awarded the Peterloo Poetry Prize, and has received a Travelling Scholarship from the Society of Authors. She has published three full collections, her latest being Not on the Side of the Gods (Arc Publications, 2019). The Scottish Poetry Library co-published two chapbooks, Light Off Water, an anthology of Catalan poetry (with Carcanet), and Territories, poems and translations of work by three Innu poets and three Scottish poets (with the EIBF). Of her three other chapbooks (all Mariscat), Figure in a Landscape won the Calum Macdonald Memorial Prize, was a Poetry Book Society Choice, was translated into Catalan and published in Mallorca, and into Spanish by Pedro Serrano and published in Mexico. She is the English translator of the late great Catalan poet, Joan Margarit: Tugs in the fog was a PBS Recommended Translation in 2006, and his five latter collections have been translated by Crowe and published by Bloodaxe over two books, the second, Wild Creature being her most recent work as a translator. She has translated five titles from Catalan and Spanish for Arc, Manuel Forcano’s Maps of Desire being a PBS Recommended Translation in 2019. She also ran a poetry workshop for fifteen years in St Andrews where she lives with her partner, the biographer, Dr Julian Crowe.