British Council Scotland - Poet to Poet Translation

Poet to Poet Translation

Find out more about the background to the Cove Park translation project.

Morning

Read Yael Globerman's poem, translated from Hebrew into English by WN Herbert.

Loneliness

WN Herbert has translated Ayman Agbaria's poem in Arabic into English.

from Scroll

Read Amir Or's Hebrew poem translated into English by WN Herbert.

Mid-Life Christ

Read a poem written in response to the Poet to Poet Translation project by WN Herbert.

Contemporary Writers

Find out more about WN Herbert on our database of contemporary writers.

	WN Herbert


	Biography

W.N. Herbert was born in Dundee in 1961, and educated there and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he published his Ph.D. thesis on the Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid (To Circumjack MacDiarmid, OUP, 1992). He has published seven volumes of poetry and four pamphlets, and he is widely anthologised.

His last five collections, all with the northern publisher Bloodaxe, have won numerous accolades. Forked Tongue (1994) was selected for the New Generation promotion, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot and Saltire prizes.

Cabaret McGonagall (1996) won a Northern Arts Award and was shortlisted for the Forward and McVities prizes; and The Laurelude (1998), written whilst he was the Wordsworth Fellow at Grasmere, was a PBS Recommendation.

All three books won Scottish Arts Council book awards. The Big Bumper Book of Troy (2002) was longlisted for Scottish Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Saltire Prize. His most recent Bloodaxe collection, Bad Shaman Blues (2006), was a PBS Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Award and the T.S.Eliot Prize.

He lives in an old lighthouse in North Shields with his wife, the novelist Debbie Taylor, and his daughter Izzie.