poet
| academic
| curator
Aviva Dautch has a PhD in contemporary poetry and her poems have been published in magazines and anthologies internationally. She was recently selected as one of the winners of the Primers Prize for emerging voices and received an Authors’ Foundation Grant from The Society of Authors. Her writing life under lockdown and poems from her forthcoming first full collection, We Sigh For Houses, were the subject of a BBC Radio 4 poetry programme in August 2020 which was chosen for Pick of the Week. Her translation of The Eighth Crossing, by Afghan poet Suhrab Sirat, was published in January 2021. In May 2021, Aviva featured as poetry expert on the BBC Radio 4 series ‘On Form’, presented by Andrew McMillan.
Aviva is the Executive Director of Jewish Renaissance, the UK’s quarterly Jewish arts magazine. She has lectured on modern Jewish culture at the University of Roehampton, the London School of Jewish Studies and JW3. She is a regular contributor to courses and programs for the British Library, the British Museum and BBC Radio 4. Aviva also works as a freelance curator and producer for many of the major London arts institutions.
We Sigh For Houses
Aviva Dautch discusses her family history, poetry and how she’s responded creatively to life under lockdown on BBC Radio 4, weaving together her poems and conversations with friends - author and her former schoolteacher Sherry Ashworth, professional declutterer Miriam Osner and actor Juliet Stevenson.
Aviva and Juliet explore why her poems reverberate for them in the current moment and discuss the positive aspects of isolation, the necessity of the arts for helping us feel less alone and how creativity can be a response to adversity. Catch up on BBC Sounds.
Primers
“Aviva Dautch’s poems are characterised by a beautiful fluency and precision of image. The subject matter of many of them is a mother and daughter relationship affected by the emotional disorder of hoarding. Thus, the poems are ‘hoards’ themselves, of words, objects and images, but what struck us about them is the way in which the poems provide order in the face of such chaos.
What further stood out to us as readers, judges and editors, is their instinctive and distinctive feel for the way language can contain or capture these complex and often messy emotions and experiences.”
Primers 2017 Judges:
Hannah Lowe, Selecting Editor
Jane Commane, Nine Arches Press
Ali Lewis, The Poetry School