Poetry can animate everything, so that life itself breathes through the line. It can make us alive to something new or remembered. Poetry must connect, communicate, enliven, disturb and stir. From my work reflecting personal life experiences of love, sex, death, fear, breast cancer, depression – to my work out of history, the Gallipoli war from both Turkish and Allied stories, life lived through movements of empires, Japanese kamikaze experiences, the Bosnian conflict of the 90’s – I find a passion, a narrative, a way through and forward and a belief in poetry as alive to life.
Robyn Rowland is an Australian-Irish citizen, living between Ireland and Australia for over 30 years; working, teaching and reading in Turkey since 2009. From December 2019 until late 2022 she lived back in NSW, Australia as companion and carer for her father, who died aged 102, in 2022.
Robyn has 14 books; 11 of poetry, including two that are bilingual, with Turkish translations by Mehmet Ali Çelikel: Under This SaffronSun – Safran Güneşin Altında, (Ireland 2019) and This IntimateWar Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 – İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915 (2015; repub.2018). Her most recent book is Steep Curve (Five Islands Press). Robyn has won or been listed for many prizes and published poetry for over 50 years. Her poetry appears in national/international journals in nine countries, over forty-five anthologies, and eight editions of Best Australian Poems. She has read at major literary festivals in 12 countries and is published in translation. She is filmed reading for the National Irish Poetry Reading Archive, James Joyce Library, UCD; for example, When he was young, once (opens in YouTube).
An extensive interview with Denise O’Hagan appeared in The Blue Nib, December 2020 and another, with Talha Erçevikbaş, in Helezon, in 2023.
Hear Robyn yourself, during the Festival guest poet session after lunch on Saturday (12th). Better still, join her fabulous workshop on Silence, its Dialects, and the Passion that Forms Them, on Thursday 10th October. Learn more here, or jump to tickets, here.)