On Monday 20 February 2017 at the British Library, award-winning poet Michael Longley CBE delivered the W. G. Sebald Lecture on literary translation.

During the lecture, he read and commented on his translations from Latin to Greek – beginning with his youthful versions from Sextus Propertius and progressing to later poems derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, taking in Sappho and Tibullus on the way. Listen to the full event below.

Michael Longley

Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939. He has published nine collections of poetry including Gorse Fires (1991) which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Weather in Japan (2000) which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was awarded a CBE in 2010 and was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2007-2010.