Words, In Other Places. Literature in Translation / Words Beyond Borders

Literature in Translation / Words Beyond Borders, an hour-long panel discussion, with Hugo Hamilton (Rooney Prize winning writer and author of The Speckled People, a German-Irish memoir which has been translated into 15 languages), Suad Aldarra (Syrian-Irish writer and winner of the Rooney Prize Award for Irish Literature 2024 for I Don’t Want to Talk about Home) and Victoria Melkovska (poet and author of For the Birds and the translator into English of Ukrainians XYZ: Habits, Tastes, Daily Life by Marta Molfar)

This discussion will be hosted by the award-winning poet and the author of five books published with Salmon Press, Adam Wyeth.

Suad Aldarra is a Syrian writer based in Dublin, awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2024. Her debut memoir, I Don’t Want to Talk About Home, was shortlisted for An Post Irish Book Awards.

Hugo Hamilton is the best-selling author of -The Speckled People – a memoir of his German-Irish childhood in Dublin, growing up with his German mother and prohibited by his revolutionary Irish father from speaking English. ‘The Speckled People’ has been translated into twenty languages. It was adapted for the stage and performed at the Gate Theatre, followed by a second memoir-based play called ‘The Mariner’. He has published two memoirs, ten novels and a collection of short stories. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker. He has won numerous literary awards for his work including the Prix Femina in France and the Bundesverdienstkreuz order of merit, awarded by the German state for his exploration of cultural diversity. Hamilton is a member of the Aosdana and lives in Dublin. His lates novel ‘Conversation with the Sea’ is published by Hachette in August 2025.

Victoria Melkovska was born in Ukraine in 1977 and has lived in Dublin since 2003. In Kyiv, she hosted many popular radio shows and worked as a journalist. Later she reported from Dublin for Ukrainian Radio and contributed to several Irish periodicals. She is the translator into English of Ukrainians XYZ: Habits, Tastes, Daily Life by Marta Molfar, a non-fiction book long-listed for BBC News Ukraine Book of the Year (2021). Victoria Melkovska’s poems have featured on RTÉ Radio and appear in many publications, including the Dedalus Press anthologies Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets (2019) and Local Wonders: Poems of Our Immediate Surrounds (2021).

Adam Wyeth is an award-winning poet and the author of five books published with Salmon Press. Collections include Silent Music (2011), Highly Commended by the Forward Poetry Prize; The Art of Dying (2016), an Irish Times Book of the Year; and about:blank (2021), which received an Arts Council Literature Project Award and was presented at the Dublin Theatre Festival, (2021). He is the author of a collection of critical essays, The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic Mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry (2013), and the play This Is What Happened. Recent work includes cross-disciplinary collaborations with composer David Downes called there will be no silence, which was presented at the National Concert Hall in 2024 as part of New Music Dublin and released as a CD with booklet by Diatribe Records. In 2024, he was keynote speaker at the SAES Conference in France for over 500 English academics on the subject of Borders. Adam is the recipient of the Patrick & Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship. His work often explores embodiment, technology, myth, and consciousness, weaving lyrical intensity with philosophical inquiry.

Words, In Other Places, an Irish Writers Centre Literary Festival, in partnership with the European Parliament Liaison Office in Ireland

Over the course of one weekend, Saturday 11 April at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University in Belfast, and Sunday 12 April at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin, Words, In Other Places will showcase a tri-lateral range of form, talent and diversity in today’s literary scene, looking to the north and south of Ireland while welcoming international writers.

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