Miek Zwamborn’s charming, diverse and poetic book on seaweed begins with a description of a rather alien-sounding piece of seaweed. I thought I could picture it, but it didn’t match anything I’d ever spotted along the coast before.

Translator and editor Michele Hutchison shares this funny and informative piece about her experiences at the James A. Brockway translation workshop, where a group of professional translators has been taking an in-depth look at the work of festival poet Mustafa Stitou.

The tour is over! Long live the tour!

I can’t believe we’ve made it this far and that everything went well. No missed trains, no missed events, no murders, no need for Inspector Morse. The final gala evening in the Tabernacle in West London was absolutely packed. It was buzzing. A triumphant grand finale for Artistic Director Rosie Goldsmith, after months of hard work.

Tour director Rosie Goldsmith chose Norwich as our fifth destination because of its strong links with the Low Countries and with literature. For example, this is the home of Writers Centre Norwich, the British Centre for Literary Translation and the famous UEA which nurtured the talents of Ian McEwan and Malcolm Bradbury.

There’s a lot riding on the tour which is why it was so wonderful that more than a hundred people turned out for the event in Birmingham. Success! In Liverpool, at the Epstein Theatre, in spite of our High Impact PR blitzing (we’ve been actively Tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, sending hundreds of press releases for months!), our audience was disappointingly small – but as Rosie said, perfectly formed.

I worked for the Dutch publishing house De Arbeiderspers for a number of years and during that time the husband of translator Liz Waters, Rowan Hewison, would periodically turn up at the office to collect (rejected) foreign titles on behalf of the non-fiction writer Lieve Joris, who spends much of her time travelling. I never found out what she did with them - until now. I also now discover what Lieve has been up to in China and about her next book.

A quest awaits me here, I’m searching for familiarity, anything that might point to a sense of belonging in this strange, mixed-up city centre where neo-classicism is at war with the ultra-modern. If you open my passport you’ll see ‘Place of birth: Birmingham’. This isn’t strictly true, I was actually born in the suburban satellite town of Solihull, but to all intents and purposes, I’m from Birmingham. I’m a Brummy. Aren’t I? Well, the short, intuitive answer is no, I’m moved away when I was six, and anyway, I feel half Dutch now. In today’s blog I’m talking to two of the High Impact authors about where they are from and how that affects their identity.

Six writers, a two-man Flemish television crew, a Flemish diplomat and three organizing Brits arrive in Oxford for a literary event in a bookshop. They arrive one snowy January afternoon (shot of white hills and ice-hung trees) and are put up in the quaint 17th century Bath Place Hotel. It’s a maze of a place made up of connecting houses, random staircases and lots of doors around a neat little courtyard with Ieylandii pot plants hung in fairy lights.

Liz Waters (b. 1960) graduated in philosophy and theology at the University of Manchester and worked at a literary agency in Amsterdam before becoming a freelance translator, mainly of quality non-fiction. She has translated Linda Polman, Fik Meijer, Paul Scheffer and Lieve Joris amongst others.

As well as translating two of the High Impact authors – Peter Terrin and Ramsey Nasr - David Colmer has translated other famous Dutch-language writers, such as novelist Gerbrand Bakker, children’s author Annie MG Schmidt and poet Nachoem M. Wijnberg. In December he was awarded the 2012 Dutch Foundation for Literature’s Translators’ Prize.