Image credit: Ariane Schick looking at the Culman family collection in the Holocaust Centre North Archive.
Are you interested in exploring how the past informs our actions in the present? Would you like to know more about how the Holocaust has shaped our contemporary understanding of genocide, ethnic persecution, and human rights? Are you interested in intergenerational trauma? Or do you perhaps have lived experience of transgenerational trauma? Do you understand the care needed when working with someone else’s life story?
The Memorial Gestures Residency Programme will support one writer and one translator with self-directed research into Holocaust Centre North’s Archive and its survivor community. Holocaust Centre North is a museum based in Huddersfield which tells the story of Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide who rebuilt their lives in the North of England. We care for the collections of over 100+ Jewish refugees and families. Find out more about our work here.
The Ernest Hecht Bursary will support the translator-in-residence with £4800 over the course of a 6-month remote residency, while the writer-in-residence will be supported by the Iby Knill Bursary, also worth £4800. Writers and translators are invited to explore our collection by responding to stories and themes they feel have contemporary relevance, and to produce a new text reflecting on their time with our materials.
For the translator-in-residence, Holocaust Centre North welcomes applications from translators working across any two languages, with a preference for languages represented in its archives, of significance in the global context of the Holocaust or of relevance to contemporary life in the North of England. For example, the translator may work with German, French, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Yiddish, Italian, Ukrainian and other languages of relevance to the European history of the Holocaust – but they may also work in Urdu, Panjabi, Gujarati, or Arabic, community languages with a significant number of speakers in the North of England. The translator will be encouraged to reflect on the experience and meaning of translation within the context of the Holocaust, or the role of translation in experiences of forced migration, loss, intergenerational trauma, or building a life in a new context.
We welcome applications for writers working in or across any form, including but not limited to poetry, prose, drama. Applicants need not have a project already in mind; we see the residencies as an opportunity for writers and translators to take time to develop and explore new avenues of their practice.
Holocaust Centre North welcomes applications from both established and emerging writers and translators based in the UK. You do not have to have published a book, but a track record of writing and publication demonstrating a commitment to developing your professional practice would be an advantage.
To apply, please submit an expression of interest (no more than two sides of A4), a writing sample (of up to 1500 words), a CV, and details of a reference to memorial.gestures@hud.ac.uk by March 29th at 5pm. Please also complete and attach our Equal Opportunities Monitoring Form. We will only contact your reference if your application is successful.
If you would like to find out more, or if you have any questions, please contact us at memorial.gestures@hud.ac.uk.