The Edwin Morgan Trust is delighted to support two events at Push the Boat Out 2026, Edinburgh’s international poetry festival. Bringing together internationally renowned writers, exciting new voices and Scotland’s vibrant literary community, the festival creates opportunities for audiences to experience poetry differently – from intimate readings and conversations to live performance, music, workshops and cross-artform events. This year’s theme, The Space Between, invites artists and audiences to explore the spaces between people, places, identities, ideas and artforms – and what can happen when we come together within them.
Writing Between Languages
Saturday 14 November, 1:15–2:15 p.m., The Pleasance – Lomond Room. Tickets: £11.55–£13.67
Discover the creative potential which exists between and within languages, with performances from three incredible poets who work across English and Persian, Arabic and Gaelic.
Ghazal Mosadeq’s The Book of Advice is an experiment in self-translation, wrestling with the inadequacy and mobility of writing. Ghazal will be interweaving her readings with that of Asmaa Azaizeh, a London-based Palestinian poet, whose work moves between page and performance. They’ll be joined on stage by Robbie MacLeòid, whose 2025 collection Am Measg Luaithrean, Beò explores different possible modes of translation and non-translation, often shifting between languages in the same poem.
Penelope’s Craft: An Online Reading
Sunday 15 November, 2–3 p.m. (GMT), online. Tickets: pay what you can
In penelope’s cra()ft: a post-epic, the acclaimed German poet and author Ulrike Draesner sees Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, take to the sea, along with 100 other women from Ithaca. Join Ulrike and the prize-winning translator Karen Leeder to hear a sneak peek of this energetic, tender and inventive book, which hasn’t yet been published in English. They’ll be discussing the renewed popularity in the Odyssey, what it means to take a feminist lens to the classics, and the subversive tradition of re-writing myths against the grain.
