Stephen Watts

He was born in London in 1952.  His father's family came from Stoke-on-Trent, his mother's from the Swiss-Italian Alps and he has cultural roots there and in Scotland. In the early 70's he lived on North Uist working as a shepherd and since 1976 has been in Whitechapel in the East End of London.
He has published three books of poetry: The Lava's Curl (Grimaldi Press, 1990), Gramsci & Caruso (Periplum, 2003), The Blue Bag (Aark Arts, 2004) and edited several anthologies: Houses & Fish (a book of drawings with writing by 4 & 5 year olds, Parrot Press, 1991), Voices of Conscience (an international anthology of censored poets, Iron Press, 1995), Mother Tongues (a special issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, 2001), and Music While Drowning (an anthology of German Expressionist poems that accompanied an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, Tate Publishing, 2003).
He has read at international literary festivals, worked extensively as a writer in schools and hospitals and communities, and currently works independently as a poet, translator, editor and bibliographer.
Forthcoming is a book of mostly long poems and he is working on a prose text concerning his grandfather's migration from the Italian Alps early in the last century, and writing a book of prose on Whitechapel.  He has translated some contemporary Kurdish, Slovenian and Persian poets, including Ziba Karbassi, and the Yiddish poet Avrom Stencl (book forthcoming), and has compiled a bibliography of 20th Century poetry in English translation due to be published online. Some of his poetry has been translated into Czech, Persian, Italian, Spanish, and Finnish.