Diana Anphimiadi is a poet, publicist, linguist and teacher. She has published four collections of poetry in Georgian: Shokoladi (Chocolate, 2008), Konspecturi Mitologia (Resumé of Mythology, 2009), Alhlokhedvis Traektoria (Trajectory of the Short-Sighted, 2012) and Chrdilis Amoch'ra (Cutting the Shadow, 2015). Her poetry has received prestigious awards, including first prize in the 2008 Tsero (Crane Award) and the Saba Prize for the best first collection in 2009. Her chapbook, Beginning to Speak, was published in 2018 by the Poetry Translation Centre, and Why I No Longer Write Poems, the first full-length Georgian-English selection of her poetry, was published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre in 2022, both titles translated by Natalia Bukia-Peters and Jean Sprackland. She lives in Tblisi with her son.
Natalia Bukia-Peters is a freelance translator, interpreter and teacher of Georgian and Russian. She studied at Tbilisi State Institute of Foreign Languages before moving to New Zealand in 1992, then to Cornwall in 1994. She is a translator for the Poetry Translation Centre in London and a member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, and translates a variety of literature, poetry and magazine articles. Her co-translation with Jean Sprackland of Diana Anphimiadi’s Why I No Longer Write Poems is published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre in 2022. She also collaborates with writer Victoria Field on literary translation. Their publications include short fiction (Sex for Fridge by Zurab Lezhava and It’s Me by Ekaterina Togonidze in Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction anthologies (2011 and 2014 respectively), two collections of poetry by Dato Magradze (Giacomo Ponti, 2012, and Footprints on Water, 2015, both with fal) and a book-length collection of short stories, Me, Margarita by Ana Kordzaia-Samadashvili (Dalkey Archive, 2015). Their most recent book is an anthology, A House with no Doors: Ten Georgian Women Poets (Francis Boutle, 2016).
Jean Sprackland is Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Chair of the Poetry Archive. Her debut collection, Tattoos for Mother’s Day (Spike, 1997), was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. Her second collection, Hard Water (Jonathan Cape, 2003), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the 2003 T.S. Eliot Prize and for the Whitbread Poetry Award. Her third collection, Tilt (Jonathan Cape, 2007), won the Costa Poetry Award. Cape also published Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach, a series of meditations on walking the beaches between Blackpool and Liverpool, which won the Portico Prize. Her most recent collections from Cape are Sleeping Keys (2013) and Green Noise (2018), while her latest prose book is These Silent Mansions: A life in graveyards (Jonathan Cape, 2020). Her co-translation with Natalia Bukia-Peters of Diana Anphimiadi’s Why I No Longer Write Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre in 2022.