Mike Baynham

Mike is a translator and poet from Otley. A retired academic, he has returned to an early passion for poetry translation, translating mainly from Spanish, and more recently from Arabic, Persian and Kurdish. He is an editor with Other Tongue Mother Tongue, magazine of multilingual poetry by migrant and refugee poets. His translations have been published in a number of publications, including Artrage, Dawn Hunter, Las Flechas de Artemis and Transference.

He is currently collaborating with the Moroccan zejal poet Adil Latefi and with the Kurdish Syrian poet, Ceger Hillo. His translation of a poem by the iconic modernist Persian poet Sohrab Sepehri was awarded a commendation in the 2022 Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize and he has recently completed a translation of Sohrab’s long poem, The Water’s Footsteps.

His translation from the work of Adil Latefi gained second prize in the 2023 Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize. He collaborated with Jiyar Homer on translations from Kurdish of the poetry of Dilawar Karadaghi, published as My Country’s Hair Turned White (Arc 2025). A self-confessed language glutton, he speaks French, Spanish and Italian with varying degrees of fluency and has been a student of Arabic for most of his adult life. In his other life as a sociolinguist he has published a book with Tong King Lee on multilingualism and translation, Translation and Translanguaging (Routledge, 2018), recently translated into Greek.