Juana Adcock is a Mexican-born Scotland-based poet and translator who works in both English and Spanish. In her first book Manca, considered by the distinguished critic Sergio González Rodríguez to be one of the best poetry books published in 2014, she explores the anatomy of her native country’s violence.
Her translations have been published in Asymptote and Words Without Borders, and she has worked on others for the British Council and Conaculta, Mexico’s council for culture and the arts. Gavia Stellata, translation of poems by Alexander Hutchison, was published by Mantis Editores (2015), and her co-translation of Julia Navarro’s Historia de un canalla was published by Penguin Random House in 2016 under the title The Story of a Sociopath.
She has also translated a collection of essays by Gabriela Wiener for Restless Books and has translated work by a number of British poets, including Helen Mort, Andrew Motion, Kei Miller and Sam Riviere, and authors such as Elena Poniatowska, Diego Enrique Osorno, Juan Rulfo and David Huerta into English.
Blue Diode published Split in 2019, her debut English language collection. It was the Poetry Book Society Choice for Winter that year, and was Highly Commended at the 2020 Forward Poetry Prize.