Merlinda Bobis offers a powerful new reading of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetry, heightened by her own experience of martial law in the Philippines of her youth.

Her reading of Lorca in both Spanish and English harks back to the Spanish civil war, threads with the Philippines' total war and the ongoing wars in our contemporary times, as well as the notion of the desaparecidos, ‘the disappeared’. As she states, ‘The dead beg us to remember them, to make the disappeared appear again’.

Merlinda Bobis is a multi-awarded writer with four novels, five poetry books, a collection of short stories and eight performance works. Her most recent award is the 2016 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for her novel Locust Girl. A Lovesong. Her latest poetry collection, Accidents of Composition, circumnavigates the globe, history, and an inner universe, and references Lorca and the desaparacidos. She is currently an Honorary Senior Lecturer at Australian National University. 

'Romance Sonámbulo' / 'Somnambular Ballad' are taken from: Lorca Selected Poems, Federico Garcia Lorca, trans. JL Gili, Penguin, 1960