Pedro Serrano

Pedro Serrano is a poet and translator born in 1957 in Montreal. He studied at the University of Mexico (UNAM) and at University of London (KCL). He founded the Avispero-Festival de Poesía de Chilpancingo in the South of Mexico and directed the Banff International Literary Translation Centre in Canada’s Rockies. He teaches Poetry and Translation at UNAM.

He has published eight books of poems in Spanish, and English translations of his poems have appeared in several anthologies and magazines in Britain, Canada and the USA. Arc published Peatlands in 2014, and The Conjurer in 2024.

The bilingual anthology of contemporary British and Irish poets, La generación del cordero, that he co-translated and co-edited with Carlos López Beltrán, was for Simon Armitage “one of the most interesting pieces about the whole movement”. He has also translated into Spanish William Shakespeare’s King John, Gabriel. A Poem by Edward Hirsch, Figure in a Landscape by Anna Crowe and Ad/herencias by W. N. Herbert.

He wrote the libretto for the opera Les marimbas de l'exil, premiered in Bezançon, his Canciones lunáticas (Lunatic Songs, music by Hilda Paredes) were performed by the Arditti Quartet at the Wigmore Hall in London in 2011, and the collaborative exhibition Camouflages, done with the Austrian painter Johannes Zechner was exhibited in 2025 in the Neue Gallerie, in Graz, Austria.

Pedro Serrano was awarded a Guggenheim Poetry Fellowship in 2007 and the Prix International de Poésie Antonio Viccaro in 2016.