This roundtable brings together three contemporary poets who write and translate their own work in Welsh and Scottish Gaelic, navigating the creative and political terrain of composing between languages. Through readings and conversation, the poets will explore what it means to carry a poem across linguistic boundaries when both tongues are their own – and when those tongues carry the weight of marginalisation, revival, and cultural memory. Audiences will hear poems in both original and translated form, followed by a discussion on identity, poetics, and the responsibilities of self-translation in the context of Celtic and Indigenous British languages.
Menna Elfyn is an award-winning Welsh poet and playwright whose fifteen collections in Welsh and English has achieved worldwide acclaim. Some of her most well-known collections in Welsh and English are Peffaith Nam/ Perfect Blemish (2007) Murmur (2012 PBS Recommended Translation), Bondo (2017) by Bloodaxe Books and her most recent Welsh language collection ‘Tosturi’ (2022) Barddas, shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. She is President of Wales PEN Cymru and the first woman Professor of Poetry in Wales and Professor Emerita at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and she was made Welsh Children’s Poet Laureate in 2002. Winner of many prizes and awards: Aderyn Bach mewn Llaw, was Welsh Book of the Year in 1990. She received the Anima Intranza International Foreign Poetry Prize in 2009 in Sardinia for her contribution to European poetry, She received a Chomondeley award from the Society of Authors Great Britain for her contribution to poetry in 2022, the first time for a Welsh language author to receive such a recognition. She is the best known and the most travelled of all Welsh poets and her work has been translated into over 20 languages including Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Lithuanian, Catalan and Hindi. She performs her work mostly in English and Welsh and has adopted a unique style by interweaving extracts of the musicality of Welsh into English translations, and in so doing reflecting the cultural diversity of the UK and beyond.
Petra Joana Poncarova’s poems have appeared in New Writing Scotland and Aimsir. They are often inspired by paintings, the experience of living between different languages, and by unexpected connections between Scotland and North Bohemia, and they betray a landlocked person’s fascination with the sea. In 2025, she received a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust and the Gaelic Books Council. In her daily life, she is an academic, researching Scottish Gaelic literature, and a translator working between Czech, English, and Gaelic.
Mererid Puw Davies, MA, MSt, DPhil (Oxon), FLSW is Professor of German Studies at UCL, where she teaches and researches on German and comparative literature, film and cultural studies, as well as literary translation. She is also interested in Welsh literatures and cultures, which form an increasing, often comparative focus in her work. In addition, Mererid is a poet and essayist in Welsh, and a Contributing Editor of the literary and cultural review O’r Pedwar Gwynt.
