Date: Sunday 26th April 2026

Venue: Watershed (W1)

Time: 10:30am - 12:30pm

Tickets: £5

✅ All Lyra Fest venues are wheelchair accessible. Access Information Pack available at www.lyrafest.com.

Words that Walk through Walls: Translating Prison Poetry

Writing Workshop

with Caroline Stockford, Dan Eltringham & Leire Barrera

Presented in partnership with East Bristol Books & Girasol Press

In this interactive writing workshop led by Caroline Stockford, Dan Eltringham & Leire Barrera, learn about prison writing as a genre, translation as activism, and its relationship to state terror, archives, and historical memory. Participants will work with copies of archival documents and literal translations, selecting one to translate themselves (guided by the facilitators). 

Supported by the facilitators, participants will translate poems from Spanish and Turkish selected from recent publications of carceral verse, Inside: Prison Poetry from Argentina, 1975-1981  (Girasol Press) and Separated from the Sun (Smokestack Books), poems by Kurdish political prisoner İlhan Sami Çomak.

Leire Barrera Medrano is a lecturer, researcher and translator raised in the Basque Country and based in Bristol. She teaches Spanish Studies at the University of Bath and co-edits Girasol Press, a small publisher of experimental translation. She is co-translator of Inside: Prison Poetry from Argentina, 1975-1981.

Dan Eltringham is a writer, bookseller, scholar, translator, editor and teacher. His latest book of poetry is My Discovery Of (Kulvert Press). Dan is co-owner of East Bristol Books (EBB, like the tide) and co-editor with Leire Barrera of Girasol Press. Dan and Leire are the translators of Inside: Prison Poetry from Argentina, 1975-1981. 

Caroline Stockford is a poet, writer and activist from north Wales. For the past 11 years she has monitored journalist trials in Turkey, campaigned to free writers in prison and led projects to defend Kurdish linguistic rights. She has translated Turkish and Kurdish literature, published by Smokestack Books, Palewell Press and Parthian. 

East Bristol Books is a small independent bookshop on Old Market, the historic eastern gateway to Bristol's city centre. Radical, diverse, independent-minded, and community-orientated, EBB reflects the nature and values of East Bristol.

Girasol Press is a small poetry publisher that explores experimental approaches to translation, book-arts and old print technologies, and the recovery of forgotten or marginalised voices and languages. It sits between the world of poetry-pamphlet publishing, which is often fast and ephemeral, and the slow-paced ethos of the artist-book.

Part of Lyra – Bristol Poetry Festival 2026

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