RCCAHF Creative Writing Fellow Translation Slam 2026

The Research Centre in Creative Arts and Human Flourishing, in collaboration with the Fryer Library and the School of Languages and Cultures warmly invites bi- and multilingual speakers to a live 'translation slam'. This event will facilitate different linguistic groups doing live, collaborative translations of a poem from Svetlana Sterlin's new poetry manuscript, authored as part of her UQ Creative Writing Fellowship. Svetlana's position was generously funded by the Copyright Agency. In small groups, we will attempt to render the poem into different languages, with input from the poet herself. No translation experience is required. The aim is not to produce polished translations, but to tease out where the challenges lie in translating poetry into different languages, and how to negotiate the interplay between meaning and metre during interlingual transfers.