Our Summer Wild Card Choice is Ballad of a Happy Immigrant by Leo Boix. Here's a sneak preview of our interview with him in the Summer Bulletin. Join the PBS today to read more.
"I want to tell a story of auspicious journeys, of ships, and queer love, of Argentinean memories and history, of diaspora, and personal as well as collective odysseys... I moved to the UK from Buenos Aires in 1997 as a young gay writer. Ballad of a Happy Immigrant was written mostly in Deal, a small East Kent coastal town overlooking the English Channel, where I swim all year round. This new existence and geography has inspired my poetry in unexpected ways, from the marine environment where I live and work every day and the woodland trees, geography and seasonal birds I’m surrounded by, to the stories I tell as a bilingual Latinx poet and translator moving from one language to another (Spanish to English and back), from one place to the next. Central is my sense of life as a journey – through history, family, identity, location and language."
Leo Boix is a Latinx bilingual poet, translator and educator born in Argentina who lives and works in the UK. He is a recent fellow of the Complete Works Poetry. His poems feature in Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe), Why Poetry (Verve Press), Islands Are But Mountains: Contemporary Poetry from Great Britain (Platypus Press) and Un Nuevo Sol: British Latinx Writers (flipped eye). Boix is co-director of Invisible Presence, an Arts Council England national scheme to nurture emerging Latinx writers in the UK. In 2019, he won the Keats-Shelley Prize.
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