Living a storied life: An interview with Mike Baynham

Abstract

Abstract Mike Baynham is Emeritus Professor of TESOL at the University of Leeds, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and former Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL). He was a Visiting Professor at York St John University (2020–2023) and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney (2019–2022). His recent publications include: Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatio-Temporal Approach (with R. Breeze and S. Gintsburg, Bloomsbury, 2022) and Translation and Translanguaging (with T. K. Lee, Routledge, 2019). In retirement he has become engaged with writing and translating poetry and various types of performance. He translates from Spanish and Arabic mainly and has published translations of the poetry of the Moroccan poet Abdallah Zrika (Baynham 2020). He is currently translating the poetry of the Moroccan zajal poet Adil Latefi and the Kurdish Syrian poet Ceger Hillo. His translation of a poem by Adil was awarded second prize in the 2023 Stephen Spender Poetry Competition. He works as a poetry editor at The Other Side of Hope magazine, setting up a bilingual poetry section, working title Other Tongue/Mother Tongue. In this interview, Mike first elaborates on the reasons behind his involvement with narrative studies and how it became clear that the Labovian model of narrative is not always valid with all types of narrative data. He then reflects on the definition of narrative, the role space and time have in it and offers, as an example of non-linear narrative a “picaresque” story, in the Arab tradition of storytelling. In conclusion Mike offers his vision of the future of narrative studies.