Bilingual Poetry: The Art in Between with Parwana Fayyaz

If you know more than one language (even a little familiarity is enough for a poem) - then this poetry workshop is for you. In this workshop, you will explore what lies between the unsaid and the unknown, in distinct languages that we grew up hearing or learnt in school, and how to make sense of emotions and memories through such languages.

Can we cross the boundaries of languages and make poetry out of unfamiliar names, and unknown expressions? Are we to find ourselves walking into a beautiful poetic journey, where we are poets in a distinct linguistic landscape? Or is it something isolating and unknown still?

Find for yourself with me.

Parwana Fayyaz is a scholar of classical and medieval Persian poetry, poet, translator, and at times photographer.

Born in Kabul, she was raised in Pakistan. After finishing high school in Kabul, she enrolled in an English language immersion program and subsequently began her undergraduate studies at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh. She transferred to Stanford University and earned both her B.A. in 2015, with a major in Comparative Literature (with Honors) and a minor in Creative Writing (Poetry), and an M.A. in Religious Studies in 2016. She then moved to Cambridge University to pursue a PhD in Persian Studies at Trinity College and took up a Research Fellowship as the Carmen Blacker Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge University in October 2020.

Her debut collection, Forty Names, was published in 2021 by Carcanet Press, and it was named New Statesman Book of the Year and White Review Book of the Year. Photo: Parwana Fayyaz by Luca Zenobi.