Caroline Stockford was born in Barmouth (Y Bermo) North Wales, and has lived in Aberystwyth since 1999. She graduated from SOAS, London University in 2000 with an MA in the History of the Turkish Language. She worked as a legal and literary translator and interpreter until starting her work with Wales PEN Cymru, for whom she ran Welsh/Kurdish translation projects and was Chair of the Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee. She worked on human rights projects for media freedom in Vienna and Bristol and won the 2018 Izmir Journalists’ Association Freedom of Expression Prize for her project ‘I-Subscribe’. Her reports (Turkey Indictment Project) into journalist cases triggered a change in the right to a fair trial laws (Law 170) in Turkey in 2022. She campaigned for the Kurdish poet Ilhan Sami Çomak for 6 years, running a global campaign and helping to secure his release from prison after 30 years, in 2024.
The poems she wrote aged 10 in Ysgol Y Traeth were read out by the teacher each year for 20 years. She started writing poetry again in 2012 and has over 1000 drafts, but due to neurodivergency, the poems keep springing up like mushrooms and are only now (2026) being edited into pamphlets.
Prizes and Publications
2017 – Parthian Books – Pomegranate Garden – poems of Haydar Ergülen – Translator and Editor
2021 – Butterfly of the Night – Palewell Press – translation of Haydar Karataş’s true story of his mother and grandmother’s survival of the Dersim Massacre.
2022 – Separated from the Sun – Smokestack Books – translator and editor of the poems of Ilhan Sami Çomak
2024 – Words that Walk through Walls – poet, translator and editor of an anthology of world poets writing for Ilhan Sami Çomak. On the basis of both of these books Ilhan was awarded the Jack Hirschman Prize for Poetry in 2024.
2022 – Commendation in the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation
2019 – Long read prize from Blue journal for the essay ‘Manual for Mourning a Great Poet’, published by The Sultan’s Seal, Cairo
Caroline’s poems have been published in Sharp as Lemons, Make Time for Aberystwyth, Burning House Press, Into the Void, Gard Journal, I am not a Silent Poet, Black Sheep Journal, Arachne Press.
Her translations of Turkish and Kurdish poets have appeared in Berlin Quarterly, Modern Poetry in Translation, Assaracus Journal, the Gay and Lesbian Review, Virus Magazine, Gard magazine, and in several journals online.
