Venue, Timing and Cost
'Poetry at Pembroke', a series of poetry readings taking place throughout Hilary term.
The series has been organised by Peter King, Lecturer in Philosophy at Pembroke. Performances take place every Monday evening at 6pm between 15th January - 5th March. Check our events page for further listings. To find out more please contact Peter King.
Alemu Tebeje Ayele is an Ethiopian journalist and poet living in exile in London. He writes in Amharic and works on translating his own and other Ethiopian poets' work with Chris Beckett. His poems have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation and PN Review. His poem "Greetings to the people of Europe" was projected on Blenheim Palace last year by the American artist Jenny Holzer as part of her "Softer" exhibition.
He also runs an active pro-democracy website campaigning for human rights in Ethiopia www.debteraw.com
Chris Beckett grew up in Addis Ababa and studied languages at Pembroke College, Oxford. His last collection "Ethiopia Boy", published by Carcanet/Oxford Poets, is a series of praise poems recreating the Ethiopia of his boyhood, and the friend he loved, Abebe the cook's son. Julian Stannard in Poetry Review called it a delight and compared it to Virginia Woolf's Orlando. As well as writing his own poems, Chris is one of the only people translating Ethiopian poetry today. Together with Alemu Tebeje, he started Tamrat Books last year, and published a first pamphlet of poems by the well-known dissident poet and writer, Hama Tuma, entitled "Just a Nobody"