Charlotte Shevchenko Knight Workshop - What’s so funny? –

The oldest surviving bar joke is Ancient Sumerian and goes something like, “A dog walked into a tavern and said, ‘I can’t see a thing. I’ll open this one’. What’s so funny about that?

Translating humour across cultures, languages, even time, is a challenge. Often, a literal translation of a joke will fall flat. But there is creative potential to be found in these failed translations of humour. We can think of them as the groundwork for new poems.

In this workshop, writers will have the opportunity to explore contemporary instances of absurdism, with an emphasis on the poetry of Heather Christle, Holly Pester, James Tate, and Jack Underwood, as well as the stand-up comedy of Norm Macdonald.

This will be followed by a series of writing exercises in which jokes from other languages will be translated into poems. No second language is required for the session, you need only bring a sense of humour.

NB Zoom links to the individual workshops will arrive in your inbox 48 hours before each workshop. Please check your junk folder.

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight is a writer of both British and Ukrainian heritage. Her debut poetry collection Food for the Dead, published by Jonathan Cape in 2024, was a winner of an Eric Gregory Award (2023) and the Laurel Prize for Best First Collection UK (2024), and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection (2024). Shevchenko Knight is a Manchester City Poet and is completing her NWCDTP-funded PhD at the Manchester Writing School. She is currently writing a work of autotheory titled The Inexpressible.

We are so pleased to have Charlotte along for the first time on our zoom workshop series.