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← The Poetry Translation Centre Ltd

2025-03-31-accounts

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TRUSTEES (as at March 2025) Octavia Lamb (Chair) Alireza Abiz Jorge Llorens Bohdan Piasecki Janet Remmington Tatevik Sargsyan

CHARITY NUMBER

1123056

COMPANY NUMBER

06313466

REGISTERED ADDRESS

Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road London, E1 6LA

COMPANY SECRETARY (as of August 2024) Nariman Youssef

BANKERS

Unity Trust Bank (as of October 2024) Four Brindleyplace, Birmingham, B1 2JB

Santander (until September 2024) (formerly Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank) Bootle, Merseyside, L30 4GB

INDEPENDENT EXAMINER

Caroline Clarke ACA Counterculture Partnership LLP 23 St Leonards Road Bexhill East Sussex TN40 1HH

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The Trustees, who are also directors for the purposes of company law, have pleasure in presenting their report and the financial statements for the charitable company for the year ended 31 March 2025. The Trustees have adopted the provisions of Accounting and Reporting by Charities: Statement of Recommended Practice applicable to charities preparing their accounts in accordance with the Financial Reporting Standard applicable in the UK and the Republic of Ireland (FRS 102) (effective 1 January 2019).

STRUCTURE, GOVERNANCE AND MANAGEMENT

Constitution

The Poetry Translation Centre Ltd (PTC) is a company limited by guarantee, incorporated on 16 July 2007 and registered as a charity on 4 March 2008. It has a Memorandum and Articles of Association as its governing document.

The Centre was established in 2004 by poet Sarah Maguire (1957–2017).

The trustees are also the directors for the purpose of company law. The trustees who served during 2024–25 were:

Alireza Abiz (until December 2024) Octavia Lamb (Chair, until April 2024) Jorge Llorens Bohdan Piasecki (Interim Chair, as of April 2024) Janet Remmington Tatevik Sargsyan

As set out in the Articles of Association, new directors are approved and appointed by the existing trustees.

Organisational Management

During the financial year 2024–25 the following people served as PTC employees:

Programmes officer Cornelius Gibbons, Events Producer Helen Bowell, and Editor Nashwa Nasreldin worked for the PTC as freelance contractors.

The PTC is an accredited London Living Wage employer.

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The PTC workplace pensions scheme (administered by Aviva) offers employees a matchcontribution of 5% of gross qualifying earnings.

During the financial year 2024-25, the PTC was based at The Albany, Douglas Way, London, SE8 4AG. As of October 2025, the PTC is based at Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road London, E1 6LA.

Advisory board

The PTC’s Advisory Board supports the organisation in the areas of artistic programme, communications and outreach. The following people served as Advisory Board members during 2024–25:

Objectives

The charity’s objectives are:

Public benefit

The Poetry Translation Centre’s main beneficiaries are: diaspora/immigrant communities in the UK and around the world; young people living in the UK from mixed-heritage backgrounds; the English-speaking public in general who encounter poetry; poets and translators who enjoy a professional development benefit through working with the PTC.

Strategic Plan

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In 2024–25 the PTC delivered the second year of its strategic plan for the period 2023–26, in connection with the PTC’s multi-year funding agreement with Arts Council England (NPO status). The year’s plan also encompassed the delivery of a 20th Anniversary Programme facilitated by a National Lottery Project Grant from Arts Council England and a number of partnerships across the country. The Strategic Plan covers artistic programme, audience development, resourcing and income generation, and is reviewed by staff and board at quarterly meetings using Arts Council England frameworks.

Risk Management

The trustees have assessed the risks to which the charity is exposed, and are satisfied that systems are in place to mitigate them. The main risks identified were:

Staff illness with impact on team capacity. Mitigate by maintaining flexible working options; agreeing sickness cover recruitment procedures (including designation of reserves); maintaining shared processes for storing knowledge and networks, acquiring a task management software.

Fundraising targets missed. Mitigate by continuing with a multi-year fundraising strategy that includes multiple prospects and involves the whole team (board and staff); maintaining the shared fundraising grid to identify, target and cultivate new supporters; agreeing areas of expenditure that can be scaled back or delayed.

Board instability. Mitigate by agreeing board competence and self-evaluation frameworks; agreeing a succession framework for the chair position; reviewing skills required on a yearly basis, or whenever trustees leave the board (whichever is more frequent); agreeing pathways for advisory board members to become trustees.

Loss of banking services. Mitigate by staying on top of changes in Charity Law; expanding board legal expertise; keeping more than one bank account active; holding a portion of funds on other platforms (e.g. Equals, PayPal).

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ACHIEVEMENTS AND PERFORMANCE

In 2024–25 the PTC delivered on its core objectives through its workshops, publications, artist development programme, digital programme, and a series of showcase hybrid events to mark the organisation’s 20th anniversary. We also completed the third biennial Sarah Maguire Prize and presented the award in a ceremony that doubled as a 20th anniversary celebration.

2024–25 PROGRAMME ACTIVITY

Translation workshops

The PTC’s translation workshop programme continued in 2024-25, exploring work by contemporary poets from around the world and working with established and emerging translators and diaspora communities. Across 11 workshops (10 in-person and 1 online) – in addition to a series of 5 in-person creative multimodal workshops working with Latinx poetry, one poetry zine workshop, and one polylingual writing workshop – we translated poetry from Vietnamese, Turkish, Somali, Georgian, Spanish (Latinx), and Portuguese (Brazil), and worked with 10 different translators, 8 poet facilitators, and 200 participants.

In total, including chargeback from partner organisations, the workshops programme brought in £4,356 in 2024-25, compared to £2,293 in 2023–24,.

Publications

The PTC is home to the acclaimed World Poet Series. The 66-page books in this series are presented as dual-language paperback editions, with the English and original-language text displayed side by side. Completing each book is an afterword essay by an English-language poet, responding to and contextualising the work for the reader. In 2024–25 we published two new titles into this series:

  1. Real by Karin Karakaşlı, translated by Canan Marasligil with Sarah Howe.

  2. The Thorn of Your Name by Víctor Terán, translated by Shook.

In addition, the PTC’s partnership with Bloodaxe Books concluded with Translation of the Route by Laura Wittner in Juana Adcock’s translation.

Income from book sales in 2024-25 was £6,080 compared to £5,351 in 2023–24. Total income from publications, including royalties and permissions, was £9,828, compared to £7,226 in the previous year.

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UNDERTOW

UNDERTOW is the PTC’s artist development programme for multilingual poets aged 16–26. In 2024–25, we delivered the third edition of the programme in partnership with the Writing Squad, Manchester Poetry Library, and Sing Lit Station in Singapore. The 2024-25 cohort was made up of six multilingual poets from UK diaspora communities paired with young multilingual poets in Singapore. The two groups benefited together from a series of online workshops, a reading group, and mentorship sessions. In addition, this year’s programme offered an expanded range of activities and public outcomes, including a hybrid (live and online) event, an exhibition, and a community workshop, with a combined audience reach of 160.

Events

The PTC delivered or partnered on 22 live events in 2024-25. These centred around four showcases with four different sets of national and international cultural and community partners. (The 20th anniversary programme included five showcases in total, the first of which was delivered in March 2024.)

In the 20th anniversary showcases, we trialled a new hybrid livestream events model whereby two events took place simultaneously in two different countries and were each livestreamed to the other. This new model created meaningful moments of exchange and connection for people through poetry and translation across borders, whilst reducing negative impacts on the environment. It enabled poets in Sweden, Georgia, Argentina, Somaliland and Singapore to speak live with their translators in the UK and Italy, and for audiences to encounter artists in two locations at once, while preserving the in-person liveevent community feel.

The 2024-25 showcases took place in the following locations: Newcastle and Tbilisi, Ledbury and Buenos Aires, Sheffield and Hargeisa, Manchester and Singapore. Each of these events was preceded or followed on the UK side by workshops or other community activities, cocurated with a local festival or organisation, which enhanced community engagement.

We also ran 4 bonus events: at the Lyra Poetry Festival in Bristol, at the London Book Fair, at the British Library in culmination of the Latinx workshop series, and online.

In addition, there were 3 book launches (2 in-person and one online) and a 5-city tour for Laura Wittner’s and Juana Adcock’s book.

Sarah Maguire Prize

The Sarah Maguire Prize is a biennial prize for published poetry in translation by a living Asian, African or Latin American poet, created in honour of the PTC’s founder. It was established with support from the British Council, the Garrick Charitable Trust, the Golsoncott Foundation, and individual donors including friends and associates of Sarah Maguire.

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The year 2024-25 marked the third edition of the prize. The judges for this edition were Ian McMillan (English poet and presenter on The Verb on BBC Radio 3), Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Irish poet, academic, and translator), and Ghareeb Iskander (prizewinning Iraqi poet and translator). Out of 40 submissions received in January 2024, they shortlisted 7 collections. The winner was On the Contrary by Lia Sturua and translated by Natalia Bukia-Peters and Victoria Field, and the prize was presented to the translators at a ceremony at the Brunei Gallery in SOAS in September.

20th Anniversary Celebration

The SMP prize ceremony was part of a wider event celebrating the 20th anniversary, for which we returned to the PTC’s erstwhile home at SOAS. Artist collaborators, longstanding partner organisations, funders and donors were invited, and around 60 were in attendance, with a further 10 tuning in to the prize ceremony part on Zoom. The catering was inspired by the SMP shortlist.

Digital programme

In 2024-25, we worked with an external web designer to redesign the PTC website and logo for the first time in over ten years. The rebrand was launched in September. The website redevelopment involved migrating to a platform with better anti-spam and bot detection tools, which means better audience stats accuracy.

Through the year, the website had 353,572 page views and 126,580 unique website sessions. Website visitors came from all over the world, with the top countries being the USA, the UK, followed by India, Pakistan, and Germany.

We uploaded 10 blogs and 2 videos. Our podcast was on hiatus but we still had 8638 downloads across two platforms through the year.

At year-end the PTC website boasted 659 poems, 221 poets, 144 translators, and 46 languages.

COMMUNICATIONS

At year-end the PTC Twitter account had 11,440 followers, down by circa 900 followers from the previous year. After much deliberation, we followed the example of many partner organisations in disengaging from the platform. We have kept our account as an archive.

On Facebook we had 10,107 followers. Our posts reached 160,774 people and achieved 1473 clicks.

On Instagram we had 3,072 followers (up 26% from the previous year) and achieved an average of 233 likes per month.

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Our mailing list had 1,273 subscribers in March 2025, with an average increase of 14 new joiners each month. The average open-rate for our emails was 44.8% (industry average is 26%), and click-rate 3.4% (industry average 2.66%).

FUNDING/FUNDRAISING

The PTC continued to receive core funding of £126,867 per annum as an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. In addition, in 2024–25 we received £52,997 through an Arts Council England Project Grant, £2,500 from trusts and foundations, £919 from individual donations and £480 from bank interest. The PTC earned £24,328 from charitable activities in 2024–25.

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FINANCIAL REVIEW

Review of results for the year

Total income was £210,658 with £234,436 expended, resulting in a deficit of £23,778 for the year. As at the balance sheet date, the charity held unrestricted (undesignated) funds of £63,424.

The PTC received £54,747 of restricted income in 2024–25, most of which was spent before the end of year.

Reserves Policy

The PTC recognises the importance of maintaining healthy reserves, to cover emergency expenses such as sudden loss of funding, legal costs or shifting economic conditions. At our quarterly board meetings we analyse our cash flow for seasonal factors, potential opportunities and overall stability. Our board of trustees has agreed a policy (below) about how reserve funds can be used; the process for authorising its use; and how this use is to be reported to the board.

Our aim is to maintain, in addition to any restricted and designated funds, an unrestricted reserves equivalent to 3 months running costs. At current levels this is approximately £40,000. Our reserves at the end of March 2025 fell below that threshold due to a fundraising shortfall.

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The trustees (who are also directors of the Poetry Translation Centre for the purposes of company law) are responsible for preparing the Trustees’ report and the financial statements in accordance with applicable law and United Kingdom Account Standards (United Kingdom Generally Accepted Accounting Practice).

Company and charity law requires the Trustees to prepare financial statements for each financial year that give a true and fair view of the state of affairs of the charitable company and of the incoming resources and application of resources (including the income and expenditure) of the charitable company for that period. In preparing these financial statements, the Trustees are required to:

The Trustees are responsible for keeping proper accounting records that disclose with reasonable accuracy at any time the financial position of the charitable company and enable them to ensure that the financial statements comply with the Companies Act, 2006. They are also responsible for safeguarding the assets of the charitable company and hence for taking reasonable steps for the prevention and detection of fraud and other irregularities.

Signed on behalf of the Trustees

Bohdan Piasecki Interim Chair

Dated: 12 December 2025

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 

 





  

 

 16/12/25     

13

  



















		 











		 











		 










		 












14





  

  

   
 

   
   
  
 
   
  
  
  

   
   
  

  



Bohdan Piasecki Interim Chair

12 December 2025

15

  





     

 



 



 



 



 



  

 



 









16

  




		 
































		 










		 




















		 







		 









17

  













		 









		 








		 














		 
















18

  



 

  
 

  

  

  
  
  
 




 
  
  








		 




		 






 



19

  

 








 







  
 

   
  
  
   

  
   
   
   

   
   

20

  





















		 













		 

























21

  





    
   


    
   

    
   

  


     
   









 



 



		 



		 



		 





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  



 



		 



		 



		 























		 




































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