Nazım Hikmet included in Southbank Center's 50 greatest love poems list

ISTANBUL

London’s Southbank Art Center has selected the greatest international poems of love from the last 50 years, including Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet's “Severmişim Meğer” (Things I Didn’t Know I Loved).

Instead of focusing on the more well-established literary names, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Shakespeare, the selectors – who are made up of poetry specialists at the Southbank Center – reviewed works that have been published in the last 50 years, The Guardian reported.

The poetry team at the center has been working on the list for the past year to produce “a truly international and stylistically diverse selection of what we see as the best 50 love poems of the past 50 years, from young poets to world greats,” said James Runcie, head of literature and spoken word at the Southbank Center.

“It was tough restricting ourselves to just 50 poems, but I think we’ve come up with a wonderfully rich and varied selection, offering some of the world’s greatest love poems,” Runcie added.

On July 20, the poems will be read at an event held at the Southbank Center’s Royal Festival Hall. A cast of 50 leading actors and poets from across the globe will form an orchestra of readers, each reading one of the greatest love poems from the last 50 years. There will be readings in various languages, including Turkish, with English translations.

Readers include Harriet Walter, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Ray Fearon, Don Paterson, Alice Orr-Ewing, Guy Paul, Imtiaz Dharker, Hubert Burton, Sasha Dugdale, Rachel Shelly, Sujata Bhatt, Emily Bruni, Patsy Ferran, Nikola Madzirov, Siobhan Redmond, Warsan Shire, Chipo Chung, Noma Dumezweni, Amjad Nasser, Claire Rafferty, Sabrina Mahfouz, Neet Mohan, Kutti Revathi, Sudha Bhuchar, Katharine Kilalea, Daniel Weyman, Ashjan al-Hendi, Jessica Murrain, Chris McCabe, Branka Katic, Tom Wentworth, Katherine Kingsley and Philip Cowell.