About Yvonne

I’m a British-born Jewess of Boukharian extraction. I write, translate and teach creative writing online.

I read law at the LSE and was called to the Bar in both New York and London. My first publication was the pamphlet, Boukhara (2007), which won The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition. I have subsequently published four full-length collections, including; The Assay (2010), Honoured (2015), and Jam & Jerusalem (2018). After Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin was named the Poetry Book Society’s Recommended Translation in 2011, and my Selected Poems and Translations was published for Kindle by Smith|Doorstop in 2014. My work has been translated into Hebrew by Tal Nitzán and published by Am Oved.

Recent publication and prize success

In 2021 my poem ‘Farouk’ was shortlisted for the Poetry Wales Prize. Read it in the PDF available here, and was later published online by London Magazine in December 2022.

In August 2021, two of my poems appeared in issue 67 of The North magazine, ‘The Silk Routes’, and ‘9/6/20’.

In 2022 my poem ‘Heritage Sites’ has been chosen for the Leeds Poetry Festival Prize longlist and will be included in their Prize Anthology.

The 2022 Second Light Prize, judged by Moniza Alvi, shortlisted my poem ‘Chil Khar‘.

In March 2023, my poem ‘Your Name’s Never Mentioned’ was published in issue 105 of Poetry Scotland.

In 2022, Issue 106 of Acumen magazine published my poem ‘Believe Me’.

Issue 69 of The North magazine contains 4 of my recent poems, ‘Alexandria’, ‘Tetrissed’, ‘The Time was Brutal’ and ‘Kaleidoscope’.

My poem ‘The Butcher’s Floor’ was highly commended in the 2023 Gregory O’Donahue Competition organised by the Munster Literature Centre.

You can find a comprehensive list of reviews of my work, publication in periodicals, and attendances at events on my Wikipedia page.

Translating:

Since The Assay I have translated 44 further poems by Lipkin including two 2000-line epics (which become 1000 lines in English due to the 12 Russian beat line becoming a six beat English line), ‘Nestor and Sorya’ which depicts previously undocumented history and the ‘Technical Lieutenant Quartermaster’, a poem which caused Anna Akhmatova to cry when Lipkin made her the very first audience and for which the Nobel Laureate, Josef Brodsky, named Lipkin ‘Russia’s War Poet’.

I have worked alongside Amarjit Chandan on some of his poems and with members of Exiled Writers Ink.

Edinburgh University Press kindly said of my work;

All the more notable, then, is the publication of Yvonne Green’s book of translations, appropriately called ‘After’, rather than ‘From’ the original. Green’s English bears the same relationship to the Russian as good cognac to fine claret: she distils, rather than translates.

https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/tal.2013.0106?src=recsys

Teaching, Running Competitions and Curating:

Going to Ann and Peter Samson’s Poetry Business creative writing classes led me to teach for the RNIB (using braille and large print versions of poems) as well as in the course of various residencies, including one at Limmud Toronto and the second Yehuda Amichai Festival.

I ran face-to-face creative writing classes at Hendon’s Public Library ‘Wall of Words’ which ended in 2012 and during this period I created and judged the WoW poetry competition.

I’ve curated poetry events including the 1st and 2nd Amichai poetry festivals in Oxford, Cambridge, Idbury and London, the first in 2009 and then again in November 2018.

I ran classes at the Taking the Temperature Series at the JW3 Centre, Europe’s largest cultural Jewish centre.

I run writing classes over Zoom at The Fitzrovia Centre on Sundays 15.00-16.00 GMT. Contact Ecre at Fitzrovia if you want to attend.

I teach a weekly Zoom class for the NER Yisrael synagogue.

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