Poems Written Through Barbed-wire Fences

Ro Mehrooz is a young Rohingya poet, translator and award-winning photographer. Born in late 1999, he is originally from Arakan (now Rakhine State) of Myanmar. Growing up under the oppression of the Burmese regime, he fled his country at the age of sixteen avoiding arbitrary arrests. He started writing in early 2016, primarily in Rohingya, about the longing for his homeland and the harsh conditions his community faced. His poems were published for the first time in 2019 in I am A Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond (Arc Publications, 2019) and various other anthologies and magazines. One of his photographs was featured in the British Museum exhibition 'Burma to Myanmar' in 2023. James Byrne was born in 1977 near London. He has published seven full collections of poetry, including The Overmind (Broken Sleep Books, 2024), Places you Leave (Arc Publications, 2022), Of Breaking Glass (Broken Sleep Books , 2022) and The Caprices, a response to Francisco Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ (Arc, 2019). Nightsongs for Gaia includes works previously unpublished in the UK, such as Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, 2015) and limited edition pamphlets,, Mythaca (2023) and Emanations (2024).As well as being a poet, Byrne is an experienced editor and translator. He edited The Wolf, an influential, internationally-minded literary magazine between 2002 and 2017 and, in 2012, he co-translated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012). He has co-edited a number of anthologies, including I Am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English, Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Arc / Edge Hill University Press, 2017) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). Byrne co-translated Libyan poet Ashur Etwebi (Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution, Arc 2022), a poem of which was selected for the Deep Vellum anthology Best Literary Translations in 2024. I Am a Rohingya was part of the supplementary evidence presented to Aung San Su Kyi when she was invited to the Hague to answer crimes of genocide against the Rohingya people. Recently, for Arc, he co-translated with Rohingya author Ro Mehrooz, Poems Written Through Barbed-Wire Fences.At present, he is working on a collection of essays, and finalising a new collection of poems.