Caroline Bergvall

Caroline Bergvall (born 1962) is a French-Norwegian poet who has lived in England since 1989. Her work includes the adaption of Old English and Old Norse texts into audio text and sound art performances.

Life and education Born in Hamburg, Germany, Bergvall was raised in Switzerland, France and Norway as well as the United Kingdom and the United States. She studied as an undergraduate at the Université de Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle, and continued her studies at the University of Warwick and Dartington College of Arts where she received her MPhil and PhD, respectively.

From 1994 to 2000, Bergvall was director of performance writing at Dartington College of Arts. She is currently Global Professorial Fellow in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London.

Performances and writing Bergvall has developed audio texts and collaborative performances with sound artists in Europe and North America. Her critical work is largely concerned with emerging forms of writing, plurilingual poetry and mixed media writing practices, in addition to Performance Writing.

Bergvall's work often draws inspiration from and explores Old English and Old Norse sources. A review of 2011's Meddle English: New and Selected Texts in The Brooklyn Rail noted that her essay "Middling English" urges readers and writers working with English to "excavate its fractured and fractious history." Eve Heisler, writing for Asymptote, summarised that "Bergvall’s projects often foreground the materiality of voice, its tics, spit, accent, errors".

Installations with Ciaran Maher include Lidl Suga for TEXT Festival (2005) and Say: "Parsley" at the Liverpool Biennial (2004). Bergvall's work has also been shown at Dia Art Foundation, Museum of Modern Art, the Serpentine Galleries, Tate Modern, and the Hammer Museum.

Drift Bergvall's 'Drift' project is exemplary of how her work embraces multi-modality. 'Drift' was commissioned as a live voice performance in 2012 by Grü/Transtheatre, Geneva. Another version was performed by Bergvall at the 2013 Shorelines Literature Festival, Southend-on-sea, UK, and produced as video, voice, and music performances by Penned in the Margins across the UK in 2014. 'Drift' was published as a collection of text and prints by Nightboat Books in 2014. An exhibition drawing on various elements of the 'Drift' project, including electronic texts made in collaboration with Thomas Köppel, prints, sound, and a "digital, algorithmic collage", was shown at Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, in 2015.

The titular poem of the 2014 Nightboat Books-published collection 'Drift' reinterprets the themes and language of the Old English elegy 'The Seafarer' to reimagine the so-called 'Left to Die' account of refugees crossing the Mediterranean sea, which was reported by Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths University in 2011. According to a review in Publishers Weekly May 2014, 'toys with the ancient and unfamiliar English', as Bergvall pays particular attention to Old Norse and Old English words and their etymologies, and conveying the experiences of lone voyagers. Drift 's feminist politics confront 'Europe's cultural and economic connection to the sea, charting a course from the Vikings, through colonialism, to contemporary slavery that puts prawns on our plates [...] reminding us of our responsibility to each other and to the world'.

In one passage of the printed text, Bergvall omits all vowels from her text followed by two pages of the letter 't'. The Poetry Review suggest that 'It's as though we’re losing sight of the poem in the fog—or as though severe weather has battered the text, which is breaking up and sinking like a shipwreck'.

Drift was a 2017 winner of the Society of Authors' Cholmondeley Prize for poetry.

Ragadawn Bergvall and ATLAS Arts began working on Ragadawn in 2016. Bergvall's collaborators for the project include composer Gavin Bryars, soprano Peyee Chen, musician Verity Susman, and sound engineer Sam Grant.

Ragadawn is a multimedia performance that explores ideas of multi-lingualism, migration, lost or disappearing languages, and how language and place intersect. It is performed with two live voices and recorded elements, outdoors, at dawn, which means the start and end times are location specific. It was premiered at the Festival de la Bâtie (Geneva) and at the Estuary Festival (Southend) in 2016.

Ragadawn (Southend) took place at Tilbury Docks Cruise Terminal on Sunday 18 September 2016, commencing at 6:38am.

Ragadawn (Isle of Skye, 57.5º N) took place at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on Saturday 25 August 2018, between 5:14am and 6:15am.

Conference: After Attar After Attar was a conversation presented by Bergvall at the Whitstable Biennale, 2 June 2018, as 'stage one' of a larger project 'Sonic Atlas'. Bergvall brought together poet Shadi Angelina Bazeghi, sociolinguist Clyde Ancarno, poet and curator Cherry Smyth, medievalist David Wallace, ornithologist Geoff Sample, and artist Adam Chodzko, in the Sea Cadets Hall at Whitstable, to discuss the movement of languages across time and space, how forms of poetry move, and the role of birds in the imagination across history: the conversation descended into everyone talking over one another and the noise of chattering birds. The title plays on 'The Conference of the Birds', a poem by Attar of Nishapur, a medieval Persian poet, whose work was adapted by Chaucer.

Residencies, fellowships, and accolades 2007-2010 - Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Southampton.

2012-2013 - Judith E Wilson Drama and English Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

2014-2015 - Writer in Residence at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.

2017 - winner of the inaugural 'Prix de l'année', 'for specific work particularly important in the field of non-book literature', of the 'Prix Littéraire Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou' created by the Centre Pompidou and Fondazione Bonotto.

2017 - recipient of the Society of Authors' Cholmondeley Award for poetry, for Drift.

Published works

Éclat, Sound & Language, 1996, Fig: Goan Atom 2, Salt, 2005, Middling English, John Hansard Gallery, 2010, Meddle English: New and Selected Texts, Nightboat Books, 2011, Drift, Nightboat Books, 2014, Alisoun Sings, Nightboat Books, 2019,

Fiction anthology I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, 2012,