Sarah Maguire, who has died aged 60 from breast cancer, was for 25 years a vital presence in British poetry as a poet and translator. Her three collections of poetry, Spilt Milk (1991), The Invisible Mender (1997) and The Pomegranates of Kandahar (2007), laid out new poetic ground in their concerns with nature, growth and the body. In 2004 Sarah founded the Poetry Translation Centre at London University, which aims to introduce new audiences to leading poets from around the world.
The PTC emerged from workshops she inaugurated during a Royal Literary Fund residency at Soas between 2001 and 2003. The centre extended Sarah’s personal practice of pairing a poet and linguist and bringing a poem into satisfying English, to many others: the PTC has now translated poets from South Korea to Somaliland, with the involvement of hundreds of writers. As a result, the PTC is a thriving, independent organisation that is a fitting legacy to this vital, capable, remarkable woman.
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