My work for the Queen’s Translation Exchange (QTE) at Oxford University is a great motivator to keep discovering new Russophone writing. And indeed, to explore what lies beyond the Russian language.

Last summer, through a connection with the Francis Skaryna Library in North London, I started to explore Belarusian poetry for the first time. And while this exploration helped me create new learning resources for the QTE, it also spurred me to both write a review of a translated collection of Belarusian language poetry, and to translate some poetry written in Belarusian myself.

As I encountered Belarusian properly for the first time, I grappled with a language that was both familiar in many ways, but which was utterly distinct from Russian. It was actually my knowledge of Ukrainian that helped the most when trying to decode what I was reading. Nonetheless, this challenge was a fruitful one. In the early months of 2026 I had the joy of RHINO poetry publishing my review of Vera Rich’s 1982 translated poetry collection, The Images Swarm Free (Read Here). Shortly afterwards Matter Monthly published a folio of poetry by female Belarusian poets that I translated from the Belarusian and Russian (Read Here).

I wonder what I will find next time I go looking.