Astrid Alben
Astrid Alben is a Dutch-born British poet, editor, experimental writer, and translator. She is the author of several poetry collections, and her poems have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Maltese, Slovene and Romanian. Alben often appears at literary festivals throughout Europe, including the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival.
Between 2002 and 2018, Alben was the co-founder and artistic director of the arts and sciences initiative PARS. In this, she curated site-specific events that combined theatre, art installations and scientific experiments, using spaces such as the Serpentine Galleries and Central Saint Martins in London, as well as the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. She was elected chair of Poetry London magazine in 2021 and is Commissioning Editor for Literature in Translation for Prototype Publishing.
Biography
Alben was born in Loosdrecht, the Netherlands, and was raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and Hawkhurst, Kent, where she attended Cranbrook Grammar School. Abandoning a law degree at Leiden University, she switched to English literature and philosophy at Edinburgh University. She divides her time between London and Amsterdam and is married to the British poet Philip Hancock.Works
Alben is the author of four collections of poetry, focusing on Dutch and English. Ai! Ai! Pianissimo appeared in 2011, Plainspeak in 2019, and Little Dead Rabbit in 2022, a collection she self-translated into Dutch and published with PoëzieCentrum in 2021 as Klein dood Konjin; there were further translations through small press outlets Broken Sleep and Arc.She is certainly responsible for bringing to greater prominence, in English, the collected works of Dutch poet F. van Dixhoorn, and her versions have been described by poet Jane Draycott as “opening up with skilled attentiveness the shapes and choreography of van Dixhoorn's unique imaginative landscapes”. In addition, Alben has translated Island mountain glacier with Prototype Publishing, the first full collection in English of Dutch poet, playwright and children's writer Anne Vegter; this was a significant development for Alben, since it associated her with a countrywoman notable in literary circles for becoming the first female poet to hold the position of ‘Dichter des Vaderlands’. In keeping with Alben’s unusual approach to publishing, this collection featured drawings by Vegter, part of the book’s effort to generate “an elastic, playful style that levels the playing field of what kinds of images carry poetic weight”.
To date, Alben’s choices of which Dutch authors to translate into English have featured poets who display engagement with an experimentally playful and intelligently absurd Europeanism, choices that sit understandably well within her own growing reputation as a poet interested in innovative literary collaborations and whose own creative output consistently displays the characteristics of being “unpredictable, elegant and wholly original.” As an editor, she also curated the anthology series Findings on... and curates site-specific events combining theatre, art installations, and scientific experiments. Her poems, reviews, and essays have been featured in many outlets, including The Times Literary Supplement, Granta and Poetry Review. Her poetic approach is novel and experimental, often involving unpunctuated stream of consciousness writing that is "supple and precise".
Books
- 2011:
- 2019:
- 2021:
- 2022: ''Little Dead Rabbit.''
Anthologies
- 2007:
- 2010:
- 2016:
Translations
- 2022: ''Island mountain glacier.''