The poems in A Friend's Kitchen book emerged in the aftermath of Al-Raddi’s arrival in the UK from Sudan, when he was separated from his wife and children for nearly five years.
During late, uncertain nights awake in a strange city, he would write brief, mystical, often stream-of-consciousness texts to post on Facebook, his primary means of communication with loved ones in Khartoum. These texts grew over time into A Friend’s Kitchen, a profound collection that deals with both the spiritual incomprehensibility and physical reality of exile. It is rendered into English by the translator Bryar Bajalan working with Al-Raddi’s friend and fellow poet Shook.
Join us to hear Al-Raddi – one of the leading African poets writing in Arabic today – reading from this newly published poetry collection.
Al-Raddi is joined by translators Bryar Bajalan and Shook, and the reading will be followed by a conversation about collaboration, writing processes and A Friend's Kitchen's powerful engagement with exile and displacement, chaired by Bern Roche Farrelly.
Praise for A Friend's Kitchen
‘A Friend's Kitchen is a book to be entered rather than read. Emerging from a Dadaist-inspired stream-of-consciousness process of writing, these poems capture a mind moving through the lived moment, illuminated as though by a struck match. The lucid translation by Bajalan and Shook retains the beauty and integrity of the original, with poems that are clear-eyed, alive to grief and wonderment. Al-Raddi holds a mirror to the experience of living apart from family and home, and in doing so shows us we are not alone in our loneliness.’ — Shazea Qureishi, author of The Glimmer
‘This is the sort of poet for whose work one wants to learn a language.’ Fiona Moore
Cost: Free
About the speakers
Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi is one of the leading African poets writing in Arabic today. Born in Khartoum, Sudan, Al-Raddi has lived in exile in London since 2012. Famous in his native Sudan, the vivid imagery of his searing, lyric poems create the world afresh in their yearning for transcendence. Famous since a teenager, he is admired for the lyric intensity of his poetry and for his principled opposition to Sudan’s dictatorship. He is the author of three collections in Arabic: Songs of Solitude (1996), The Sultan's Labyrinth (1996) and The Far Reaches of the Screen... (1999 & 2000).
Bryar Bajalan is a writer, translator, and filmmaker currently pursuing a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, where he researches depictions of eroticism in the poetry of Mosul. His work has appeared in Ambit, Hyperallergic, Modern Poetry in Translation, Spoon River Poetry Review, and World Literature Today, and on the Poetry Foundation website. His present projects include the translation of poets displaced from Shingal during the Islamic State’s genocide of the Êzîdî people, and the collection of oral histories in Mosul. He has presented his work at the Shubbak Festival in London, the Exeter Respect Festival, and Translating Poetries: A Symposium for Translation Practitioners at SOAS, as well as in The Rest of Us magazine. His short documentary about early twentieth-century Baghdadi poet al-Zahawi won an award for outstanding achievement at the Tagore International Film Festival. He recently completed a short film based on Sudanese poet al-Saddiq al-Raddi’s poem ‘The Book of Sorrows’.
Shook is a poet, translator, and editor whose work has spanned a wide range of languages and places. Winner of the 2021 Words Without Borders-Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Contest for their work with poet Conceição Lima of São Tomé and Príncipe, their most recent translations include the Mexican experimentalist Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon and Kurdish iconoclast Farhad Pirbal’s Refugee Number 33,333, co-translated with Pshtiwan Kamal Babakir. Shook’s own poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages, including Isthmus Zapotec, Kurdish, and Uyghur.
Bern Roche Farrelly is a writer, dramaturg and producer with ten years of experience as an arts administrator. His work includes writing and directing Determine, a choose your own adventure style play set in a world without free will at The Yard Theatre in 2014. He produced The People Versus Democracy, an interactive theatre game for Hobo Theatre. Performed at London's Free Word Centre during the 2015 UK general Election the show was called 'A provocative piece of theatre' by RemoteGoat and received a five-star review from BritishTheatre.com. He was the dramaturg and producer of Freud The Musical, at the King's Head Theatre in 2016 & VAULT festival in 2018. He is a founding member of Working Birthday theatre company.
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