Viviana Fiorentino - Poet, writer and translator

Viviana Fiorentino is Italian and lives in Belfast. She is a poet, writer and translator and Board Member of Irish PEN, an organisaiton that promotes freedom of expression. She teaches Italian at IIC Dublin and Project Artist at Quotidian Word of the Street Ltd). Her poems appeared in anthologies (Dedalus Press, Salmon Poetry, Arlen House) and literature magazines (i.e. The Stinging Fly, Italian Poetry Review, The Blue Nib, Honest Ulsterman, The Trumpet). Some of her poems were recorded for the Irish Poetry Reading Archive (UCD). She translated into Italian some poems by Anne Carson and a collection of poems by Freda Laughton.

In Italy, she published two poetry collections (Controluna Press, Zona Contemporanea) and Tra mostri ci si ama, a novel (Transeuropa Press). She is a board member of the Irish PEN and Le Ortique, an initiative to rediscover forgotten women artists. Viviana also co-founded the activist poetry initiative Letters With Wings, an initiative to give voice to imprisoned artists around the world. She is recipient of SIAP grants from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (2019/22).

She is one of the winners of the 2022 Irish Chair Of Poetry Student Prize.

On December 1st at the Italian Institute of Culture there will be an event of female Irish poets translated into Italian: a feast of poetry and translation, a poetic bridge between two cultures. Four poets, eight Italian translators and guests among which there will be Viviana Fiorentino too. INFO and BOOKING

Enjoy a poem by Freda Laughton, below the English and Italian version