REBECCA STELTNER

As part of our continued effort at Sentinel Poetry Movement to honour and give exposure to poets of all ages and backgrounds, we are pleased to introduce our Guest Poet for February 2003: Rebecca Steltner.

This young German poet, still an undergraduate at Canterbury is gradually making and impact in poetry environments in England and Germany.

Rebecca loves to translate most of her own poems into English for a variety of reasons, including a desire to reach a wider readership, to preserve the original ideas and meanings that might be lost in the process of translation and also because it gives her a chance to reinvent in the process--because she finds sometimes that in the course of translation she discovers better expression not only of diction but of ideas. This way, she caters for her German-speaking public as well as the English-speaking community in which she lives and works.

Born on the 20^th of April 1982 in Hamburg, Germany where she grew up with her mother, Rebecca has been writing poems since her early childhood and when, aged twelve, she joined her school's creative writing club she began to focus her life around writing.

In 1998, at the age of sixteen, she took part in an exchange programme and spent 3 months in a high school in Shanghai, China. Two years later, after her Abitur (A-levels) in 2000 Rebecca came to the UK to study for a Bachelor of Arts honours degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury. This was also a step towards exploring her roots and getting know her father's country, whom she did not know at the time.

At university Rebecca edits the literary magazine Logos and is an active member of the local poetry group. She is now in the final year of her BA and looks forward to maybe going to Edinburgh for an MA in European Literature or Translation Studies.

Rebecca's poems have been published in three German anthologies namely, Hamburger Ziegel (no. 7) 2000/2001; Vertraulich, Dirk Strauch (ed.), Edition-Elf, Burgdorf, 2003, Ausgewählte Werke V, Nationalbibliothek, 2002 and some literary magazines, notably Dreischneuss and Hamburger Blätter.

You can hear her read from a chapter "sommervergessen" of her unpublished collection of poems by following this link:

Or read other poems in translation at www.wanderingdog.co.uk  Rebecca's web pages are currently being built at www.rebecca-steltner.de and will be up and running soon.