EXILED LIT CAFE:
WRITERS FROM BANGLADESH, IRAN AND SOUTH AFRICA

Mir Mahfuz Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh and studied at Essex University. He dances, acts, has worked as a male model and a tandoori chef. He has given readings and performances at the Royal Opera House and other theatres in Britain and beyond. His poems have appeared in London Magazine, Poetry London, Ambit and Exiled Ink. He is currently preparing his first collection for publication. He has been working closely with his mentor, Moniza Alvi and was short-listed for the New Writing Ventures Awards 2007.

Shereen Pandit was a South African lawyer and political activist before coming into exile in the UK in 1987 where she completed a PhD in Law. Her short stories have appeared in many anthologies and magazines and have won several prizes including the Booktrust London Award. Her articles and reviews have appeared in several magazines.
Shirin Razavian was born in Tehran where she studied Persian and English Literature. Because of the censorship and lack of freedom of expression, she fled her country and started building a new life in London. She has published three Persian poetry books in London in 1995, 1999 and 2001. Her Farsi-English book Which Shade of Blue? is being published in the USA shortly. Shirin has had several radio and TV interviews with the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Azadi, Radio Israel and other Persian exiled media.

Their chap books, published 2008 by Exiled Writers Ink, will be available:

A Golden Bowl by Mir Mahfuz Ali, Flamingoes at Sunset by Shereen Pandit and Free Fall by Shirin Razavian.
Hosted by Nathalie Teitler

www.exiledwriters.co.uk

29 April 2008

12 exciting, emerging exiled writers and the launch of their chap books

Exiled Writers Ink Mentoring and Translation Scheme (Year 1) participants
Shereen Pandit ( South Africa), Abol Froushan ( Iran), Ali Abdolrezaei ( Iran),
Sofia Buchuck ( Peru),
Vesna Ruzicka-Sehovic ( Sarajevo), Hasan Bamyani ( Afghanistan), Hassan Bahri (Syria),
Samira Al Mana ( Iraq), Mir Mahfuz Ali ( Bangladesh), Shirin Razavian ( Iran),
Bashir Al Gamar ( Sudan), Mogib Hassan ( Yemen)
The evening will take place at:
Amnesty International Human Rights Action Centre

8 March 2008

Organisation: Association des Chercheurs Iraniens - ACI
Venue: Frontline Club – 13 Norfolk Place, London
Subject: International Women’s day
Participants:
Shirin Razavian - exiled poet and campaigner for free press in Iran
Tahirih Danesh - Human Rights Researcher / Documenter bullet

Roya Kashefi - Human Rights Committee - ACI 

Elizabeth Sidney, OBE

National Alliance of Women’s Organisations – NAWO 

United Nations Development Fund for Women – UNIFEM UK

Women’s Federation for World Peace – WFWP (General Consultative Status of ECOSOC and DPI Associates with the United Nations)

Border Crossings

Plays of Love & War
28 October2016

Acklam Theatre, Notting Hill Gate

Exiled Writers Ink
Poetry readings from three exiled writers: Tehran-born poet Shirin Razavian, Iraqi poet Wafaa Abdulrazak and Zoila Forss, a visiting Peruvian-Finnish poet.

Followed by Plays of Love & War, When Nobody Returns in a stunning co-production with the compelling ASHTAR Theatre of Palestine. When Nobody Returns is the companion piece to This Flesh is Mine described in 2014 by the Guardian as a play that 'truly breaks down barriers’.

Freedom in Speech
14 October 2016

 An evening of poetry and spoken word performances held at The Society Club in Shoreditch as a part of the 4 day festival held by Let's All Be Free organisation.

Readings by Naomi Shihab-Nye an American-Palestinian award-winning poet, Shirin Razavian a Tehran-born British poet who has appeared in Poetry London, Index on Censorship, Exiled Writers Magazine, Agenda and Persian Book Review among others and Charlie Dupré, a spoken word and rap artist known for combining literary influences with a pulsing, characterised delivery.

Poetry Reading at South Bank Centre
5 August 2016

Exiled Writers Ink promotes cross-cultural dialogue through performance, publishing and education, and advocates human rights through literary expression and activism.

Poets included Nineb Lamassu, of Assyrian Iraqi roots, who writes his poetry in modern Assyrian; Shirin Razavian, a Tehran-born British poet who has published five Farsi and English poetry collections in the UK; and Suhrab Sirat, a poet, writer and journalist who was born in Afghanistan’s Balkh Province and moved to the UK in 2014; Shie Raouf, a Kurdish Iraqi poet who came to the UK at the age of nine and currently performs throughout London; Hussam Eddin Mohammad, a journalist who founded Al-Wa'I publishing in Damascus and co-founded the Syrian Writers Association.

By Robert Chandler

When Nathalie Teitler from ‘Exiled Writers Inc.’ first asked me if I would translate some poems by an Iranian poet living in London, my first impulse was to say no. My knowledge of Farsi is elementary, and I had already taken on as much translating work as I felt I could manage. Fortunately, I decided to wait until I had seen a few poems; I asked Shirin to send me four poems, together with literal translations.
What I then received, to my delight and surprise, were three poems that Shirin had translated herself, and which needed only a very little editing – and one poem that she had originally written in English. I shall quote the beginning:

The Grey Morning

Runs its cold delicate hands
Over my shoulders
And playfully toys with my dress
The grey morning
Is full of the murmurs of life
The sounds of today
Voices of today
And the silent pains of yesterday
Which nobody speaks of

I was astonished by such clarity of voice even in a learned language, and I realized at once that a poet with this command of English would be able to explain her Farsi poems even to someone with my imperfect knowledge of the language.
More important still, Shirin writes with absolute directness and lack of pretension. I read Farsi slowly, letter by letter, like a child who has only recently learned to read. If it takes me ten minutes to puzzle out a few sentences, it is painful to discover that the writer has used twice as many words as he needed, and that the thought is in any case banal. But when I read a poem like ‘Water Song’, the images are so vivid that I almost forget that I am reading in a foreign language. Literally, two stanzas from this could be translated as:

Let me switch on
my loneliness meter:
how many degrees
below zero
is the temperature of loneliness?

The fish of my heart swims below the ice,
golden and hopeful,
and it sees the sun fogged
as if through frosted glass
and laughs shyly in itself.

This almost works as English poetry, but ‘itself’ is a weak word to end a stanza on, and ‘the temperature of loneliness’ somehow sounds less striking in English than it does in Farsi. Trying to make my English as direct and vivid as Shirin’s Farsi, wanting to remove anything that might obscure the clarity of her images, I made a few small changes:

Let me switch on
my loneliness meter:
how many degrees
below zero
will it say?

Below the ice swims the fish of my heart,
golden and hopeful,
and it looks at the sun
as if through frosted glass
and laughs shyly in its heart of hearts.

Shirin enters wholeheartedly both into the world outside her – as is clear from her political poems – and into the world within her – as is clear from these lines addressed to her son, Arvin, when he was still in her womb:

I enter, with you,
each moment’s smell
and touch, with you,
time’s smallest cells.

It has been a joy, and a privilege, to enter, even in a small way, into Shirin’s world.

Robert Chandler is a translator of the poetry of Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire and a University lecturer in London.
He has translated poetry and prose by Pushkin and a considerable amount of other Russian prose, including Vasily Grossman’s Life & Fate.