UNDERTOW: The Future is Multilingual

A multinational, multilingual poetry event, bringing together young poets from the UK and Singapore via live video hook-up, to read poems that exist in many languages. A positive look at a potential future for poetry and self-expression unbound by linguistic categories and national borders.

There will be poetry readings and a discussion of multilingual creativity from poets from the Poetry Translation Centre’s UNDERTOW programme, who are joined by poets from a programme in Singapore run by Sing Lit Station. The UNDERTOW poets are young poets from mixed heritage and diaspora backgrounds living in the UK who take part in the programme unlock the creative potential of polylingual creativity. As part of the programme, they are paired with young poets from Singapore where multilingualism is the norm and English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil are all spoken, alongside Singlish, an English creole that has grown out from contact between all on the languages in the island city-state.