Writer and translator in residence wanted for Holocaust Centre North

A Holocaust educational centre in west Yorkshire is looking for a paid writer and translator to join its expanding artistic residency programme.

Holocaust Centre North’s (HCN) Memorial Gestures residency was launched in 2022 to give leading and emerging artists the opportunity to create brand new artwork inspired by its archives and in response to its themes and collections around Holocaust remembrance and history.

Now, as of March 1st 2024, the Centre is seeking a writer and a translator to join its four current artists as part of this unique project. They are invited to respond to and translate the Centre’s memories, artefacts and accounts which cover themes of discrimination, displacement, trauma, migration, loss, memory and hope  – through creative and artistic practices.

The two further residencies are paid, one for a writer-in-residence working in any form (such as poetry, prose, drama) and one for a translator-in-residence working across any two or more languages, with a preference for languages represented in its archives, of significance in the global context of the Holocaust or of relevance to contemporary life in the North of England.

The translator-in-residence is dedicated to the memory of Ernest Hecht, British publisher, producer, and philanthropist, described by The Bookseller as ‘one of a number of émigrés who changed the face of British publishing after the Second World War’. Born in 1929 in Czechoslovakia, Ernest Hecht arrived in Britain as a Kindertransport child in 1939.

The residencies will be primarily remote but will also offer the writer and translator opportunities to spend time in the Holocaust Centre North archive, accessing original material relating to the lives of survivors before and after their experience of persecution.

• To find out more, contact memorial.gestures@hud.ac.uk. Deadline for applications is March 29th at 5pm. More details of the residency, including an Open Call are available on the Holocaust Centre North website (hcn.org.uk).