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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Authors

The World Bookshelf

Explore by author

Soleïman Adel Guémar

Soleïman Adel Guémar

Books

State of Emergency

Soleïman Adel Guémar was born in Alger in 1963 into a left-wing political family of Berber ancestry. He studied electrical engineering in the army, spent 2 years in France working in publishing, then, at the promise of free national elections, returned to Algeria in 1991 to work for the weekly newspaper L’Evènement. The elections were cancelled when an Islamist party won a landslide at local elections and L’Evènement was banned. For 10 years, Guémar worked in Algeria as a freelance journalist and publisher, but when he applied for a permit to publish a magazine of investigative journalism, he fell foul of the regime and was subjected to a campaign of violent intimidation. In 2002, he arrived at Heathrow claiming political asylum and has since been granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK, where he now lives with his family in South Wales.

José Eduardo Agualusa

José Eduardo Agualusa

Books

My Father's Wives

A General Theory of Oblivion

José Eduardo Agualusa was born in Huambo, Angola, in 1960, and is one of the leading young literary voices from Angola and from the Portuguese language. Arcadia was pleased to publish his Creole, awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, as well as The Book of Chameleons, winner of the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Agualusa divides his time between Brazil, Angola, and Portugal.

César Aira

César Aira

Books

The Proof

The Lime Tree

César Aira is a translator as well as the author of around 80 books of his own – so far. He was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, and moved to Buenos Aires in 1967 at the age of eighteen and was, by his own admission, ‘a young militant leftist, with the notion of writing big realist novels.’ By 1972, after a brief spell in prison following a student demonstration, he was writing anything but.

His writing is considered to be among the most important and influential in Latin America today, and is marked by extreme eccentricity and innovation, as well as an aesthetic restlessness and a playful spirit. He is without a doubt the true heir to Jorge Luis Borges’ literature of ideas. He has been called many things: ‘slippery’ (The Nation), ‘too smart’ (New York Sun), ‘infuriating’ (New York Times Book Review) and a writer of ‘perplexing episodes’ (New York Review of Books). He’s also been called ‘one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today’ (Roberto Bolaño).

Rabai al-Madhoun

Rabai al-Madhoun

Books

The Lady from Tel Aviv

Born in al-Majdal, Palestine, in 1945, Rabai al-Madhoun is one of the Arab world’s rising literary stars. His other works include The Idiot of Khan Younis and The Taste of Separation. The Lady from Tel Aviv is a bestseller in the Arab world. He has worked as an editor for the leading Arabic daily, al-Sharq al-awsat.

Nasrin Alavi

Nasrin Alavi

Books

We are Iran

Nasrin Alavi is the author of We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs (Portobello Books, 2005), which was translated into several languages. She has contributed to Nader Hashemi & Danny Postel eds., The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Freedom in Iran (Melville House, 2011). Her writing has also been published in the Financial Times Magazine, the Times, the Independent, Private Eye, La Vanguardia (Spain), and Das Parlament (Germany); and she has written extensively for Germany’s Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung.

Bakhtiyar Ali

Bakhtiyar Ali

Books

I Stared At the Night of the City

Bakhtiyar Ali was born in Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan, in 1966, and currently resides in Cologne, Germany. He is a novelist as well as a literary critic, essayist and poet, and is widely considered one of the most prominent Kurdish writers by readers in Kurdistan as well as in the Kurdish diaspora; he is one of few contemporary Kurdish writers to be translated into English. He has published nine novels and several collections of essays and poetry.

Antonio Altaribba

Antonio Altaribba

Books

The Art of Flying

Antonio Altarriba, who was born in 1952, and is a Spanish essayist, novelist, critic and short story writer who began working in comics in the 1980s. He has also lectured in French literature at the Universidad del Pais Vasco.

Eli Amir

Eli Amir

Books

The Dove Flyer

Eli Amir was born in Baghdad in 1937, and his family moved to Israel in 1951 alongside 20,000 other Jewish exiles. He served as special advisor to the Prime Minister, responsible for Arab affairs in east Jerusalem, and worked as a political columnist, lecturer, and member of the Israeli delegation on Palestinian refugee affairs. Amir has also been chairman of the public council of The Abraham Fund for Coexistence and Equality between Israeli Arabs and Jews.

His work has received many awards, including: the Yigal Alon prize for Outstanding Service to the Israeli Society (1997); Youth Immigration’s Jubilee Prize (1983); the Jewish Literature Prize (Mexico, 1985); the Ahi Award (1994); Am Oved’s Jubilee Prize (1994); the Book Publishers Association’s Platinum Prize (1998); and the Prime Minister’s Prize (2002). He has received Honorary Doctorates from the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Ben Gurion University and the Tel Aviv University.

Antonella Anedda

Antonella Anedda

Books

Archipelago

Antonella Anedda is a poet and essayist who lives in Rome, and has been a lecturer in Lugano. She has published five collections of poetry, which have won many prizes including the Premio Sinisgalli for a first collection, the International Montale Prize, the Dessi Prize, the Napoli Prize, and the prestigious Premio Viarreggio-Repaci. She has translated Sappho and Ovid from the classics as well as numerous recent poets including Philippe Jaccottet and Anne Carson.

The several books of essays she has published are principally concerned with literature and the visual arts, though her prose piece Isolatria was a study of Sardinia.

Though born in Rome (in 1955), she comes from a Sardinian family and has passed a great deal of her life between the capital and a small island, La Maddalena, off the coast of Sardinia, which has continued to deeply inform both her poetry and her prose. Her work has been translated into many European languages as well as into Japanese, Korean and Hebrew. Her first English edition, Archipelago, translated by Jamie McKendrick, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2014.

Bohdan Ihor Antonych

Bohdan Ihor Antonych

Books

The Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych

Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909 – 1937) took the folklore language and traditions of the Lemke region, which was part of Poland between the first and second world wars, and transplanted them into literary Ukrainian. The Lemke were a Ukrainian mountain people whose culture and traditions were rooted in crop cycles and pagan mythology and, in Antonych’s work, the boundaries between the narrator, the natural world and the music of the poems become blurred within an ecstatic pagan celebration of life.

He was only 27 when he died, but he seems to have lived several lives in one lifetime, producing six collections of poetry, reams of prose, an opera libretto, a novella and an unfinished novel, as well as editing a couple of journals. His legacy deserves a new audience among readers of English language poetry.

Alberto Arce

Alberto Arce

Books

Blood Barrios

Alberto Arce, joined the Associated Press (AP) in February 2012 as a correspondent in Honduras, where for several years he was the only foreign correspondent to report from Tegucigalpa. He later joined AP’s Mexico City bureau and The New York Times. He is a 2018 Knight Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan. He won the 2012 Rory Peck award for features his coverage of the battle for Misrata during the Libyan civil war and several other awards in the United Sates for his coverage in Latin America and has also reported from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, Gaza or Syria. Blood Barrios is his second novel, he has also published Misrata Calling (2012).

Elisabeth Asbrink

Elisabeth Asbrink

Books

1947: When Now Begins

Elisabeth Asbrink is a journalist and author from Sweden. Her previous books have won the August Prize, the Danish-Swedish Cultural Fund Prize, and Poland’s Kapuscinski Prize. 1947 is her fourth book in Swedish and the first of her works to be published in English. It will also be published across the world, including in Germany, Norway, Finland, Italy, Slovakia, Denmark, Australia, and the USA.

Neil Astley

Neil Astley

Books

The World Record

Neil Astley is editor of Bloodaxe Books, which he founded in 1978. His books include novels, poetry collections and anthologies, most notably the Bloodaxe Staying Alive trilogy: Staying Alive (2002), Being Alive (2004) and Being Human (2011), which were followed by Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (2012).

His other anthologies, all from Bloodaxe, are Pleased to See Me: 69 very sexy poems, Do Not Go Gentle: poems for funerals, Passionfood: 100 Love Poems, Soul Food: nourishing poems for starved minds with Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Earth Shattering: ecopoems, the DVD-books (filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce) In Person: 30 Poets and In Person: World Poets, The World Record: international voices from Southbank Centre’s Poetry Parnassus (with Anna Selby, 2012), The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems and Funny Ha-Ha, Funny Peculiar: a book of strange & comic poems.

Novels he’s published are, The End of My Tether,  which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, and The Sheep Who Changed the World.

He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry and was given a D.Litt from Newcastle University for his work with Bloodaxe Books. He lives in Northumberland.

Alaa Al Aswany

Alaa Al Aswany

Books

The Yacoubian Building

A journalist and one of the Arab world’s bestselling novelists, Alaa Al Aswany is the author of The Yacoubian Building, Chicago and Friendly Fire. By day he has worked as a dentist in Cairo, where he had his first office in the Yacoubian Building, and by night he is a writer, published in over twenty languages worldwide.

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel

Books

By Night The Mountain Burns

The Gurugu Pledge

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel was born in 1966 in Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s only Spanish-speaking country. His parents were from the remote Annobón Island, off the African coast. His books include Avión de Ricos and Ladrón De Cerdos (The Rich Man’s Aeroplane and The Pig Thief) and the short story collection Cuentos Crudos (Raw Tales). By Night The Mountain Burns (Arde El Monte De Noche) is based on his memories of growing up on Annobón.

Ávila Laurel has been a constant thorn in the side of his country’s long-standing dictatorial government. A nurse by profession, for many years he was one of the best known Equatorial Guinean writers not to have opted to live in exile. But, in 2011, after a week-long hunger strike in protest against Obiang’s regime, timed to coincide with the President of Spain’s visit to Equatorial Guinea, Ávila Laurel moved to Barcelona. He writes across all media as a blogger, essayist and novelist.

Basma Abdel Aziz

Basma Abdel Aziz

Books

The Queue

Basma Abdel Aziz is an Egyptian journalist and psychiatrist who treats torture victims at Cairo’s Nadeem Center, continuing her work even after the center was raided and closed by Egyptian authorities in February 2016. She has long been a vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, has published several works of nonfiction, (including Beyond Torture and The Temptation of Absolute Power), and earned the nickname “The Rebel” for he outspoken struggle against injustice, torture, and corruption. The Queue is her first book translated into English. She lives in Cairo.

Arkady Babchenko

Arkady Babchenko

Books

One Soldier's War In Chechnya

Arkady Babchenko was born in Russia in 1977. He fought as an 18-year-old conscript in the first Chechen War of 1995-6 and then volunteered to return for six months in 2000 during the second Chechen War. A law graduate, he has worked in Moscow as a  currently journalist for the non-conformist newspaper Novaya Gazeta. This is his first book. He is married with one small child.

Natalka Babina

Natalka Babina

Books

Down Among the Fishes

Natalka Babina was born on May 15, 1966 in Belarus, close to the border with Poland and Ukraine, and graduated from the Belarusian Institute of Technology in Minsk. Babina worked at the editorial departments of two Belarusian newspapers. Since 1994, she’s published her works in the independent newspaper Nasha Niva. Since 2006, she has become a journalist at the same venue, also collaborating with other presses in Belarus and Ukraine.

Natalka Babina authored a collection of stories, The Blood Should Not Be Seen and a novel The Town of Fish, both translated into Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Czech. Natalka became the laureate of the Cherkasova Prize of the Belarusian Association of Journalists in 2010.

Bandi

Bandi

Books

The Accusation

Bandi is the Korean word for ‘firefly’. It is the pseudonym of an anonymous dissident writer still living in North Korea. In 1989, Bandi began to write a series of stories about life under Kim Il-sung’s totalitarian regime. The Accusation provides a unique and shocking window on this most secretive of countries.

Tomas Bannerhed

Tomas Bannerhed

Books

The Ravens

Tomas Bannerhed grew up on a farm in southern Sweden but has lived in Stockholm since the 1990s. He has been a university lecturer and editor, and spent two years on the highly-respected creative writing course, Nordens Författarskola.

The Ravens is his first book and won the prestigious August Prize in the Best Swedish Fiction Book category, in 2011. It also won Sweden’s major prize for first novels and Stora Läsarpriset, a prize awarded by an online book-group community, its winner selected by readers. The Ravens has been translated into a number of languages including German, French and Dutch.

Mourid Barghouti

Mourid Barghouti

Books

I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

Mourid Barghouti is a Palestinian poet and writer. He was born in 1944 in Deir Ghassana near Ramallah. He has published over ten books of poetry, including Muntasaf al-Lail (Midnight). His Collected Works came out in Beirut in 1997. He was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry in 2000. His autobiographical narrative Ra’ytu Ramallah (I Saw Ramallah) won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature (1997) and was translated into several languages.

Barroux

Barroux

Books

Alpha

Barroux was born in Paris and spent much of his childhood in North Africa. He studied at the famous École Estienne and École Boule, and is now renowned for his children’s book illustrations. Barroux’s books include Uncle John and the Giant Cherry Tree, winner of the Enfantaisie Award, and Line of Fire – Diary of an Unknown Soldier (On Les Aura!).

Julia Eccleshare says, “Line of Fire is one of the most extraordinary – and beautiful – books about the First World War… Through Barroux’s wonderful illustrations readers emphasise absolutely with the soldier’s experience. A striking and unforgettable black and white graphic novel.”

Sherko Bekas

Sherko Bekas

Books

Butterfly Valley

Sherko Bekas was born in Iraqi Kurdistan, son of the poet Fayaq Bekas, and published his first book when he was 17. He joined the Kurdish liberation movement in 1965 and worked in the movement’s radio station (the Voice of Kurdistan). In 1986, he left his homeland because of political pressure from the Iraqi regime and from 1987 to 1992, he lived in exile in Sweden where Butterfly Valley was printed in January 1991, around the time of the first Gulf War. Shortly afterwards, following the uprisings in the Kurdish and the Shiite regions in March 1991 Bekas was able to retrun to Iraqi Kurdistan. He died in Stockholm, Sweden on 4 August 2013.

Bessora

Bessora

Books

Alpha

Bessora is a doctor of anthropology and a prize-winning novelist. Her novel, Les Taches d’Encre, won the Felix Fénéon prize and her Cueillez-moi Jolis Messieurs won the Grand Prix Littéraire d’Afrique Noire. Bessora was born in Brussels and grew up in Europe, America and Africa.

Frei Betto

Frei Betto

Books

Hotel Brasil

Frei Betto, born in 1944, is a Brazilian writer, political activist, liberation theologian and Dominican Friar.  He was imprisoned for four years in the 1970s by the military dictatorship for smuggling people out of Brazil.  He is still involved in Brazilian politics, and worked for the government of President Lula da Silva as an advisor on prison policy and child hunger. His books have been translated into 23 languages. Hotel Brasil is his first crime novel.

Mbarek Ould Beyoruk

Mbarek Ould Beyoruk

Books

The Desert and the Drum

Hassan Blasim

Hassan Blasim

Books

The Madman of Freedom Square

The Iraqi Christ

Iraq + 100

Hassan Blasim was born in Baghdad in 1973, and studied at the Academy of Cinematic Arts. In 2004, a year into the war, he fled to Finland. As well as being the director of numerous short films and one Kurdish feature film, Blasim is a poet and short story writer with several collections published, as well as work published in magazines, websites and anthologies, including Prospect magazine and Madinah. He has also worked as co-editor of the Arabic literary website www.iraqstory.com.

Adrien Bosc

Adrien Bosc

Books

The Madman of Freedom Square

The Iraqi Christ

Constellation

Adrien Bosc was born in Avignon in 1986. He is the founder of Éditions du sous-sol and the magazines Desports and Feuilleton. Constellation is his first novel. It is an international bestseller, and won the 2014 Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie Française.

Milena Busquets

Milena Busquets

Books

This Too Shall Pass

Milena Busquets was born in Barcelona where she attended the Lycée Français de Barcelone. She obtained a degree in archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, began work in publishing, and has since founded her own publishing house. She currently works as a journalist and as a translator.

James Byrne

James Byrne

Books

Bones Will Crow

James Byrne is the editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine and has published poetry collections, Passages of Time and Blood / Sugar.  He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, and the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees. He helped to organize the ‘World Poets’ Tour’ for the Poetry Translation Centre at SOAS, London, in 2004. In 2008 he won the Treci Trg poetry prize in Serbia. Since 2006 James has taught regular Wolf Workshops, which have helped many students with first book and pamphlet publications.

Lydia Cacho Ribeiro

Lydia Cacho Ribeiro

Books

The Sorrows of Mexico

Lydia Cacho Ribeiro is a Mexican journalist, feminist and human rights activist, whose reporting focuses on violence against and sexual abuse of women and children. Despite being incarcerated, brutally tortured and threatened by corrupt officials for her work, she has become a leader of the freedom of expression and human rights movement in Mexico. She is also the author of a number of books of which Los Demonios del Edén/Monsters in Eden (Grijalbo, 2005) and Memorias de una Infamia/Memoirs of an Outrage (Debate, 2008) caused a national furore, while Slavery Inc.: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking (Portobello, 2013) has appeared in many languages throughout the world. She has received numerous international awards for her journalism, including the Civil Courage Prize, the Wallenberg Medal, the Olof Palme Prize, the Amnesty International Ginetta Sagan Award for Women and Children’s Rights and the Hrant Dink Award.

Jesús Carrasco

Jesús Carrasco

Books

Out in the Open

Jesús Carrasco was born in Badajoz in 1972 and lives in Seville. Since 1996 he has worked as an advertising copywriter. His first novel, Out In The Open, was declared Book of the Year by booksellers in Madrid. The Dutch translation was shortlisted for the European Literature Prize 2014. Out In The Open will be published in nineteen countries around the world.

Matthew Cassel

Matthew Cassel

Books

Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus

Matthew Cassel is a journalist and photographer who has reported on the Middle East for Al Jazeera English. Cassel first learned about the region through his human rights and media work in Palestinian refugee camps. Over the past decade he has worked in the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Bahrain and elsewhere. Formerly assistant editor of the The Electronic Intifada online journal, he is connected to activists, journalists, writers, artists and others at the forefront of the movement for change in the region.

Javier Cercas

Javier Cercas

Books

The Anatomy of a Moment

Javier Cercas was born in 1962 in Ibahernando, in the Cáceres province of Spain. He worked as a teaching assistant at the University of Illinois for two years in the 1980s, and became Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Girona in 1989, a post he held until 2006.

He has published numerous literary studies, translations and essays and has also been a regular columnist for El País. He wrote his first volume of short stories, El móvil, in 1987, followed by his first novel El inquilino (1989). In 2001, Cercas’ novel Soldiers of Salamis was published to great acclaim, winning awards such as the Premio Salambó in 2002. David Trueba’s film adaptation (2003) won a Goya award.

The Anatomy of a Moment (published in Spain in 2009), for which Cercas won Spain’s National Narrative award, sold over ¼ million copies.

Grégoire Chamayou

Grégoire Chamayou

Books

Drone Theory

Grégoire Chamayou is a research scholar in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. The author of Manhunts: A Philosophical History, he lives in Paris.

Robert Chandler

Robert Chandler

Books

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

Robert Chandler studied Russian at Leeds University and spent the academic year 1973-74 as a British Council exchange scholar in Voronezh, a large city 200 miles south of Moscow.

His translations of Sappho and Apollinaire are published in the series Everyman’s Poetry. His own poems have been published in the TLS and elsewhere, but he is best known for his translations from Russian. These include Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows, The Road and Life and Fate, many works by Andrey Platonov, and Hamid Ismailov’s novel The Railway, set in Central Asia.

He has compiled three anthologies for Penguin, including The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, published in February 2015. He is also the author of Brief Lives: Alexander Pushkin.

For several years he has taught classes in literature and translation at Queen Mary, University of London. He also works as a mentor for the BCLT mentorship scheme.

His translations have won prizes in both the UK and the USA and his co-translation of Vasily Grossman’s An Armenian Sketchbook was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize.

Söyüngül Chanisheff

Söyüngül Chanisheff

Books

The Land Drenched in Tears

Söyüngül Chanisheff was born on 3 October 1940, in the Urumqi, capital of of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (aka East Turkistan). She enrolled at the Medical University of Xinjiang after completing her secondary education in 1958. She was imprisoned in 1962 on charges of separatism and spent three years in solitary confinement while forced to do hard labour. Upon her release from prison in 1966, the year when the Cultural Revolution started, she was put under a state surveillance regime and suffered numerous hardships until she managed to leave the country with her family in 1981. She has since been living in Australia.

Cheran

Cheran

Books

In a Time of Burning

Cheran, one of the best known Tamil poets, was born in 1960 in the seaside village of Alaveddy in Sri Lanka. His father, T. Rudhramurthy, (1927-71) known widely as ‘Mahakavi’, the Great Poet, was one of the leading literary figures in modern Tamil writing from Sri Lanka. Cheran grew up with a grounding in the Tamil classics, but from his early years, he also became familiar with the works of the younger, left-leaning poets who frequented their house.

He graduated from Jaffna University with a degree in Biological Sciences. These were the years when ethnic conflict and civil unrest in Sri Lanka spread alarmingly. The Tamil people were outraged when Sinhala policemen set fire to the Jaffna Public Library in 1981 destroying over 95,000 books, some of them irreplaceable; but what followed was possibly even worse. In July 1983 one of the worst pogroms against the Tamils began in Colombo and spread all over Sri Lanka. After this there were acts of violence and atrocities which were experienced daily by the Tamils.

In 1984 Cheran joined the staff of the Saturday Review, an English language weekly that was known for its stand on press freedom and fundamental rights and justice for minorities. As a poet and a political journalist, Cheran refused to align himself with any of the several Tamil militant groups that were active in Jaffna at the time. As a result he was harassed both by the Sri Lankan army and, later, by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). He left for the Netherlands in 1987 where he completed a Masters degree in Development Studies. Returning to Colombo two and a half years later, he helped to start the Tamil newspaper, Sarinihar, published by the Movement for Inter-Racial Justice and Equality. He was advised to leave the country yet again in 1993. Cheran went to Toronto, Canada where he completed his PhD.

He has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. His academic interests focus on the study of ethnicity, identity, migration and international development. Side by side with his academic career, he has continued to write his poetry and to contribute to literary and political journals.

Rafael Chirbes

Rafael Chirbes

Books

On the Edge

Rafael Chirbes (1949 – 2015) wrote nine novels and received the National Prize for Literature and the Critics Prize for On the Edge. ABC named him ‘the best writer of the 21st century in Spain’.

Ivan Chistyakov

Ivan Chistyakov

Books

The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

Ivan Chistyakov was a Muscovite who was expelled from the Communist Party during the purges of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He commanded an armed guard unit on a section of BAM, the Baikal-Amur Railway, which was built by forced labour. He was killed in 1941.

Renato Cisneros

Renato Cisneros

Books

The Distance Between Us

Renato Cisneros   (Lima, 1976) is a well-known journalist, broadcaster and writer in Peru, where he presents current affairs programmes on radio and TV. Having published a number of books of poetry and two novels, in 2015 he stepped back from his career as a broadcaster to fully concentrate on his writing. The Distance Between Us   has sold over 35,000 copies in Peru alone and has been lauded in the Peruvian and international press. It was shortlisted for the Second Mario Vargas Llosa Biannual Award, longlisted for the Prix Médicis (2017) and was the winner of the Prix Transfuge du Meilleur Roman de Littérature Hispanique (2017). A prequel,   Dejarás la tierra   is already a bestseller in Spain and Latin America and will be published by Charco Press in 2020. Renato Cisneros lives in Madrid.

Philippe Claudel

Philippe Claudel

Books

Parfums

Philippe Claudel is a novelist, film director and university lecturer. His film I’ve Loved You So Long won the 2009 BAFTA for Best Film Not in English. He is the author of Grey Souls, Brodeck’s Report, Monsieur Linh and His Child and The Investigation, and in 2012 was appointed to l’Académie Goncourt.

Paolo Cognetti

Paolo Cognetti

Books

The Eight Mountains

Paolo Cognetti was born in 1978 in Milan. He divides his time between the city and his cabin 6,000 feet up in the Italian Alps. The Eight Mountains   has spent a full year in the Italian bestseller lists and is published in 38 countries. The novel has won both Italy’s Premio Strega and the French Prix Médicis étranger.

Sarah Cohen-Scali

Sarah Cohen-Scali

Books

Max

Sarah Cohen-Scali is a French writer, born in Morocco. She has published a number of books for both young adults and adults. Max, first published in France by Gallimard, has won the Prix des Dévoreurs de Livres 2014, the Prix Passages 2014, the Prix Tatoulu Noir 2014, the Prix Sorcières 2013 and the Prix Jeunesse des Libraires du Québec, 2013.

Raph Cormack and Max Shmookler

Raph Cormack and Max Shmookler

Books

The Book of Khartoum

Raph Cormack is a translator and PhD student in modern Arabic literature. He has worked as a translator for Egyptian playwright Ali Salem as well as running his own Arabic translation blog which has featured work by Mohammed Taymur, Ahmed al-Kashif, and Mohammed Ahmed Mahjoub, among others.

Max Shmookler is a doctoral student in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. His research focuses on Arabic literary history with a particular interest in modern Sudanese prose. He has translated the Sudanese authors Nagi al-Badawi, Sabah Sanhouri and Adil al-Qassas for Words Without Borders.

Mia Couto

Mia Couto

Books

Confession of the Lioness

Mia Couto, born in Mozambique in 1955, is one of the most prominent writers in Portuguese-speaking Africa. His books are deeply rooted in the political upheavals, languages and narratives of his native land and have been published in more than 20 countries.

He has won many awards, including the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and was selected for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize shortlist. He lives in Maputo, and works as a biologist.

Kamel Daoud

Kamel Daoud

Books

The Meursault Investigation

Kamel Daoud is an Algerian journalist based in Oran, where he writes for the Quotidien d’Oran – the third largest French-language Algerian newspaper. He has contributed weekly columns to Le Point, and his articles have appeared in Libération, Le Monde and Courrier International, and are regularly reprinted around the world.

A finalist for the Prix Goncourt, The Meursault Investigation won the Prix François Mauriac and the Prix des Cinq-Continents, and was shortlisted for the Goncourt du Premier Roman. A feature film is slated for release in 2017.

Michel Déon

Michel Déon

Books

The Foundling Boy

Born in Paris in 1919, Michel Déon is the author of more than 50 works of fiction and non-fiction, and a member of the Académie française.

His novel Les Poneys Sauvages (1970) was awarded the prestigious Prix Interallié and in 1973 Le Taxi Mauve (later made into a film starring Fred Astaire and Charlotte Rampling) won the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française. Le Jeune Homme Vert (The Foundling Boy) was published in 1975, with the sequel published two years later.

Déon lives in Ireland with his wife, Chantal, and their horses.

The Book of Dhaka authors

The Book of Dhaka authors

Books

The Book of Dhaka

Akhteruzzaman Elias is widely regarded by critics as one of Bangladesh’s greatest fiction writers, despite having written only two novels and 22 short stories before his untimely death in 1997.

Anwara Syed Haq is a prominent Bengali writer and distinguished psychiatrist by profession, with numerous publications to her name.

Bipradash Barua is one of the most distinguished and prolific writers of fiction in Bangladesh with over 140 books and countless awards.

Moinul Ahsan Saber is one of Bangladesh’s leading fiction writers, with a literary career spanning over three decades. He first came into the limelight following the publication of his debut collection of short stories, Porasto Sahish, in 1982.

Parvez Hossain is prominent in contemporary Bangladeshi fiction. His anthology, Dubochor, was named Book of the Year by Prothom Alo in 2013.

Rashida Sultana is a writer and poet, she has published several short story collections and is currently working for the African Union/United Nations Hybrid Operations in Darfur, Sudan.

Salma Bani is a powerful contemporary voice in Bangladeshi fiction. An alumnus of the University of Dhaka, she has published numerous novels and now lives and writes in Canada.

Shaheen Akhtar is the highly acclaimed author of four novels and five collections of short stories. Recently, she was awarded the Bangla Academy Shahitya Puroshkar prize for fiction and currently works for the Bangladeshi human rights/legal aid organisation ASK.

Syed Manzoorul Islam has published short stories and novels in Bengali aswell as a volume of self-translated short stories in English, titled The Merman’s Prayer and Other Stories. He is on the panel of editors of Jamini, an international journal of arts, and Six Seasons Review, a literary journal. Islam is a professor of English at the University of Dhaka.

Wasi Ahmed is an award-winning novelist and short story writer whose works, in the original Bengali aswell as in translation, have been anthologised extensively in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. Currently associated with an English daily in Bangladesh, Ahmed will participate in the International Writing Programme – Fall Residency, hosted by the University of Iowa, in 2016.

Diego Marani

Diego Marani

Books

The Last of the Vostyachs

Diego Marani was born in Ferrara, Italy in 1959. Marani is a novelist, translator, essayist and newspaper columnist. In 1996 he invented Europanto, a mock international auxiliary language. Marani has published different articles, short stories and video clips in Europanto.  His most famous novel New Finnish Grammar has been translated into several languages and won the Grinzane Cavour Literary prize. His last book La Bicicleta Incantata has been made into a film. Marani now works as a Policy Officer for the Directorate-General for Interpretation of the European Union.

Artur Domosławski

Artur Domosławski

Books

Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life

Artur Domosławski has written on international politics for the weekly review Polityka and for the Polish edition of Le Monde diplomatique, and for two decades reported for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. In 2010, he received Poland’s prestigious Journalist of the Year Award. A Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 2005-2006, he is the author of several books.

Elvira Dones

Elvira Dones

Books

Sworn Virgin

Diao Dou

Diao Dou

Books

Points of Origin

Diao Dou was born in 1960 in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China. Since graduating from the Beijing Broadcasting Institute in 1983, he has worked as a journalist and latterly as a literary editor. Although his first book was a collection of poetry, Aiqing jishi (Chronicles of Love, 1992), he is best known as an author of novels and short stories.

His five novels are Siren dang’an (Personal File, 1998), Zhengci (Testimony, 1999), Youxifa (Playing the Game, 2002), Wo ge Diao Bei nianbiao (My Brother, Diao Bei: A History, 2008) and Qinhe (Close to You, 2011). He has also published five collections of short stories: Duzi shangsheng (Ascending Alone, 1996), Shaizi yi zhi (A Roll of the Dice, 1996), Shijishang shi hujiu (A Cry for Help, 2006),Qingshu kao (Love Letters: A Study, 2014) and Chuchu (Points of Origin, 2015). He has also published one collection of essays, Yi ge xiaoshuojia de shenghuo yu xiangxiang (The Life and Imagination of a Novelist, 2012).

Diao Dou is regarded as one of China’s leading satirists, praised for his refusal to follow any of the numerous literary trends that often dominate the Chinese literary scene. In 2003, he was awarded the ninth annual Zhuang Zhongwen Prize for Literature.

Points of Origin is the first appearance of his collected works in English.

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

Books

The Colonel

Thirst

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi was born in 1940 in Dowlatabad, northwest Iran and is a writer and actor, known primarily for his realist stories focussing on rural life. His writing draws from his own experiences, such as helping his father with farming, tending flocks, and reading Persian folklore in his youth. He attended high school in Tehran and later joined the Anahita Drama group. In 1975 he was arrested and spent a year in prison.

Dowlatabadi began writing in the 60s and has published many novels, novellas, short story collections and plays. His first story, The Pit of Night, was published in 1962 in the Anahita Literary Magazine. Other major works include his 1968 novel, The Tale of Baba Sobhan which was filmed as Khak (Earth / dust) in 1972 by Masud Kimiai. Between 1977 and 1984 he wrote Kalidar, a novel about a persecuted family and a classic of Persian literature. His novel The Colonel was shortlisted for the Haus der Kulturen Berlin International Literary Award in 2009.

Boris Dralyuk

Boris Dralyuk

Books

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

Boris Dralyuk holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA and has been a lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews.

His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, World Literature Today and other journals. He is the translator of Leo Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need (Calypso Editions, 2010), A Slap in the Face: Four Russian Futurist Manifestos (Insert Blanc, 2013), Anton Chekhov’s Little Trilogy (Calypso Editions, 2014), and Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (Pushkin Press, 2014); co-translator of Polina Barskova’s The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems (Melville House, 2011) and Dariusz Sośnicki’s The World Shared: Poems (BOA Editions, 2014); and author of the monograph Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907–1934 (Brill, 2012). He received first prize in the 2011 Compass Translation Award competition and, with Irina Mashinski, first prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition.

Dulce Maria Cardoso

Dulce Maria Cardoso

Books

The Return

Dulce Maria Cardoso is a Portuguese writer, who spent her childhood in Luanda, Angola after her parents moved there when she was an infant. Her family returned to Portugal following the Angolan War of Independence in 1975. She studied law at the University of Lisbon and worked as a lawyer before becoming a full-time writer. Her first novel, Campo de Sangue, won the Grand Prize Acontece de Romance, O Meus Sentimentos won the EU Prize for Literature and O Chão dos Pardais won the Portuguese PEN Club Award. The Return is her fourth novel.

Dominique Eddé

Dominique Eddé

Books

Kamal Jann

Dominique Eddé was born in Beirut in 1953 and now lives in France and Turkey. Best known as a novelist and essayist, her articles have appeared regularly in Le Monde and Le Nouvel Observateur.

She initiated and led an international photographic assignment in Beirut in 1991 with six photographers including Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka and Gabriele Basilico, which led to the publication of Beyrouth Centre-Ville.

Her novels include Pourquoi il fait si sombre? (1998) and Cerfvolant (2003). The latter was published in English translation by Seagull Books in 2012 and was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in the US.

Mikail Eldin

Mikail Eldin

Books

The Sky Wept Fire

Mikail Eldin worked as a journalist, before taking up arms himself in the conflict with Russia. He eventually left Chechnya in fear for his life and secured political asylum in Norway, where he now lives.

Álvaro Enrigue

Álvaro Enrigue

Books

Sudden Death

Álvaro Enrigue was born in Mexico in 1969. He is the award-winning author of five novels and two books of short stories. His first novel La muerte de un instalador won the 1996 Joaquín Mortiz Prize. In 2007, the Bogotá39 project named him one of the most promising Latin American writers of his generation.

Enrigue is the former literary editor of Mexico’s leading literary publication Letras Libres. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, n+1, Bomb Magazine and his short stories have been widely anthologized.

In 2012-13 he was Research Fellow and Visiting Professor at Princeton University. The previous year he was awarded the prestigious Cullman Fellowship by the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers. In 2009 the Rockefeller Foundation named him Resident Fellow at the Bellagio Center. He was, in 2008, GQ Magazine’s (Latin America) Writer of the Year.

Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck

Books

The End of Days

Go Went Gone

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. She has worked on opera and musical productions and her fiction has been translated worldwide. She is the author of The Old Child & The Book of Words and Visitation, all published by Portobello Books.

Bi Feiyu

Bi Feiyu

Books

Three Sisters

Bi Feiyu is a Chinese journalist, poet, novelist and screenwriter currently living in Jiangsu Province, Nanjing. He co-wrote the script for Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad. Feiyu was editor at the literary magazine Yu Hua and journalist at the Nanjing Daily for six years, though he only contributed 6,000 words during his entire time there.

Bi Feiyu often tells others’ stories rather than his own, creatively weaving his own experiences into their tales. His skilful writing has earned him a number of literary accolades: he has twice been awarded the prestigious Lu Xun Prize, and in 2010 he won the Man Asian Literary Prize for Three Sisters.

Feiyu was due to visit the UK in 2010, to attend an English PEN event promoting Three Sisters, but unfortunately his visa application was lost in red tape and the visit had to be cancelled.

Jérôme Ferrari

Jérôme Ferrari

Books

The Sermon on the Fall of Rome

Jérôme Ferrari was born in Paris in 1968. He worked as a professor of philosophy in Algiers for four years before moving to Corsica and then to Abu Dhabi. He came to international prominence in 2012 when he won the Prix Goncourt for The Sermon on the Fall of Rome.

Timothée de Fombelle

Timothée de Fombelle

Books

Vango: Between Sky and Earth

Timothée de Fombelle is a popular French playwright and has achieved international success as a fiction author with his stunning debut, Tobie Lolness: La Vie Suspendue (Toby Alone) and its sequel Les Yeux d’Elisha (Toby and the Secrets of the Tree). In 2013, the first book in Timothée’s Vango series, Vango, book one: Between Sky and Earth won an English PEN award. The final instalment Vango, book two: A Prince without a Kingdom was also published to great critical acclaim.

Julia Franck

Julia Franck

Books

Back to Back

Julia Franck was born in Berlin in 1970. Her novel The Blind Side of the Heart won the German Book Prize and sold over a million copies in Germany alone. It was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by the Guardian and US magazine Kirkus Reviews. Back to Back was only her second novel to be translated into English.

Carl Frode Tiller

Carl Frode Tiller

Books

Encircling

Encircling 2

Carl Frode Tiller (born 4 January 1970 in Namsos) is a Norwegian author, historian and musician. His works are in Nynorsk (lit. ‘New Norwegian’), one of the two official Norwegian standard languages.

Tiller made his literary debut in 2001 with the novel Skråninga (The Slope), which was recognized as the best Norwegian literary debut of the year. In November 2007 he was awarded the Brage Prize and Norwegian Critic’s Prize for his novel Encircling (the first of a trilogy by the same title). He went on to receive the European Prize for Literature and a nomination for the premiere Scandinavian literature prize, the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize for the sequel, Encircling II. The last of the trilogy, Encircling III, was published to critical acclaim in Norway, in 2014.

Julián Fuks

Julián Fuks

Books

Resistance

Julián Fuks was born in São Paulo and is the son of Argentinian parents. He has worked as a reporter for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo and as a reviewer for the magazine   Cult.   Fuks is the author of Fragmentos de Alberto, Ulisses, Carolina e eu   (2004) and   Histórias de literatura e cegueira   (2007), which was a finalist for the Telecom Award as well as the Jabuti Award. His novel   Procura do romance   (2011) was shortlisted for the São Paulo Prize for Literature and longlisted for the Telecom Award. His latest novel,   A resistência, was awarded the 2017 José Saramago Prize. He was one of   Granta‘s Best of Young Brazilian Novelists in 2012.

Daniel Galera

Daniel Galera

Books

The Shape of Bones

Daniel Galera was born in Sao Paulo in 1979. He co-founded the influential publishing house Livros do Mal, and has translated David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and Irvine Welsh into Brazilian Portuguese. He has published a collection of short stories and three novels, including Blood-Drenched Beard, as well as an acclaimed graphic novel (with Rafael Coutinho).

Santiago Gamboa

Santiago Gamboa

Books

Night Prayers

Santiago Gamboa was born in Bogotá, Colombia. His debut novel, Paginas de Vuelta (1995), established him as one of the most innovative voices in Colombian literature. He has since published seven novels and two collections of short stories. Necropolis, published by Europa in 2012, was the recipient of literary prize La Otra Orilla when first published in Spanish.  Gamboa’s journalism appears regularly in El Tiempo (Colombia) and Cromos, and he’s a regular contributor to Radio France International. His short stories have appeared in a number of publications including PEN Atlas.

Carlos Gamerro

Carlos Gamerro

Books

The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón

Carlos Gamerro is one of the best-known and most highly-regarded contemporary Argentine writers. Born in Buenos Aires in 1962, he has published six works of fiction, including the novels The Islands (And Other Stories, 2012 UK and 2014 North American publication) and An Open Secret (Pushkin Press). And Other Stories will publish The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón in 2015. He adapted The Islands for a major theatrical production in 2011 and writes influential works of criticism. In addition Gamerro, who was brought up bilingually in English and Spanish, has translated Shakespeare, Auden, and Harold Bloom.

Mireille Gansel

Mireille Gansel

Books

Translation as Transhumance

Mireille Gansel has published translations of a number of distinguished poets including Nelly Sachs, Peter Huchel, and Reiner Kunze, as well as letters by Paul Celan. After living in Hanoi in the seventies, she published the first volume of classical Vietnamese poetry translated into French. Her second and third books as an author, Une petite fenêtre d’or and the poetry collection Comme une lettre,were published in France in 2017.

Photo credit:  Jean-Yves Masson

François Garde

François Garde

Books

What Became of the White Savage

Born in 1959, François Garde grew up in Aix-en-Provence and studied at the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration before embarking upon a career as a senior civil servant. He worked for many years in the French Overseas Territories in the Southern Pacific and Indian Oceans, before becoming a novelist.

Published in 2012, What Became of the White Savage, is Garde’s first novel. Winner of nine literary prizes, including the prestigious Prix Goncourt in the first novel category for 2012.

Yan Ge

Yan Ge

Books

The Chilli Bean Paste Clan

Yan Ge was born in 1984 in Sichuan in the People’s Republic of China, and currently lives in Dublin, Eire. She recently completed a PhD in comparative literature at Sichuan University and is the chairperson of the China Young Writer Association.

Her early work focused on the wonders, gods and ghosts of Chinese myth and made her especially popular with teenagers. The novel May Queen (2008) saw her break through as a critically acclaimed author. She now writes realist fiction, strongly Sichuan-based, focussing with warmth, humour and razor-sharp insights on squabbling families and small-town life. People’s Literature magazine recently chose her – in a list reminiscent of The New Yorker’s ‘20 under 40’ – as one of China’s twenty future literary masters, and in 2012 she was chosen as Best New Writer by the prestigious Chinese Literature Media Prize. Yan Ge was a guest writer at the Netherlands Crossing Borders festival in The Hague, November 2012, and since then has appeared at numerous literary festivals in Europe.

Her novel The Chilli Bean Paste Clan   was published in Chinese in May 2013 by Zhejiang Literature Press, and been translated into German, French and several other languages. An excerpt from The Chilli Bean Paste Clan was earlier featured in Chutzpah magazine in Chinese, and in English translation here under the title “Dad’s not dead”.

Fabio Geda

Fabio Geda

Books

In The Sea There Are Crocodiles

Fabio Geda was born in Turin in 1972. A successful Italian novelist, he also writes for several Italian magazines and newspapers, and teaches creative writing in Scuola Holden, Turin.  His first novel, Per il resto del viaggio ho sparato agli indiani, was published in 2007 in Italy, France and Romania, and won the Best Debut Award for Literary Via Po Torino. He released his second novel, L’esatta sequenza dei gesti, in 2008.

In the Sea There Are Crocodiles is Geda’s first book to be translated into English. It is based on his relationship with Enaiatollah Akbari, whom he looked after upon the young boy’s arrival in Turin.

Azita Ghahreman

Azita Ghahreman

Books

Negative of a Group Photograph

Azita Ghahreman was born in Mashhad in 1962. One of Iran’s leading poets, she has lived in Sweden since 2006. She is the author of five collections of poetry, Eve’s Songs (1991), Sculptures of Autumn (1995), Forgetfulness is a Simple Ritual (2002), The Suburb of Crows (2008) and Under Hypnosis in Dr Caligari’s Cabinet (2012). In 2013 she was a recipient of Swedish PEN’s Prince Wilhelm Award.

Russian and Ukrainian translations of her poems were awarded the Udmurtia Russian Academy’s Ludvig Nobel Prize in 2014. Her pamphlet, Poems, was published by the Poetry Translation Centre in 2012. Negative of a Group Photograph, a dual-language Farsi-English edition translated by Maura Dooley with Elhum Shakerifar, is published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre.

Margherita Giacobino

Margherita Giacobino

Books

Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter

Margherita Giacobino, born in 1952, lives in Turin. She is a writer, journalist and translator. She has translated many works by renowned authors, including Emily Bronte, Gustave Flaubert, Margaret Atwood, Dorothy Allison, and Audre Lorde.

Her debut novel Un’ Americana a Parigi was written under the pseudonym of Elinor Rigby and published in 1993. She is also the author of Casalinghe All’Inferno (1996), L’Educazione Sentimentale Di C.B. (2007) and L’Uovo Fuori Dal Cavagno (2010).

Her most recent work, The Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter, was first published in Italy in 2015 and has already been translated into French and German. It is the first novel by Margherita Giacobino to be translated into English

André Gide

André Gide

Books

The Vatican Cellars

André Gide (1869–1951) was a giant of twentieth-century French literature. An innovator of the novelistic form, he undertook a life-long exploration of morality in his work, and was a major influence on the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

Besides fiction, Gide’s oeuvre encompassed travel writing, essays, plays, poetry and autobiographical works. Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947.

After a strict Protestant upbringing, Gide went on to question organised religion. He travelled widely, and was critical of many of the colonial practices he encountered. It was while in North Africa that he befriended Oscar Wilde.

The Vatican Cellars was written at the midpoint of Gide’s career and provoked scandal at the time of publication for its mockery of the Church and supposed amorality. It has not been widely available in the UK for 25 years.

Wioletta Greg

Wioletta Greg

Books

Swallowing Mercury

Wioletta Greg is a Polish poet and writer. She has published six volumes of poetry and a novella, Swallowing Mercury, based on her childhood and experience of growing up in Communist Poland.

Her poems have been translated into English, Catalan, and Welsh, and her poetry collection Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance was shortlisted for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Wioletta also won The Goldene Eule 2015 in Vienna, and her poetry was recorded as part of the British Library’s Between Two Worlds: Poetry and Translation audio project in 2012. She lives on the Isle of Wight.

Frédéric Gros

Frédéric Gros

Books

A Philosophy of Walking

Frédéric Gros has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris XII and the Institute of Political Studies, Paris. He was the editor of the last lectures of Michel Foucault at the Collège de France. He has written books on psychiatry, law and war. He lives in Paris.

Faïza Guène

Faïza Guène

Books

Dreams from the Endz

Faïza Guène was born in France in 1985 to Algerian parents. She wrote her first novel, Just Like Tomorrow, when she was 17 years old. It was a huge success in France (where the title was Kiffe Kiffe Demain), selling translation rights around the world. Just Like Tomorrow was shortlisted for the Young Minds Book Award 2006 and longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2007. Since then she has published three more novels, Dreams from the Endz (2008), Bar Balto (2011) and Men Don’t Cry, which is forthcoming in English translation by Sarah Ardizzone in 2017. She lives in Pantin, Seine-Saint-Denis, a suburb north of Paris.

Malu Halasa

Malu Halasa

Books

Syria Speaks

Malu Halasa is an editor and writer based in London. Her books include Creating Spaces of Freedom: Culture in Defiance (2002); Kaveh Golestan: Recording the Truth in Iran (2007); and The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design (2008), with Rana Salam. She co-edits the occasional
book series, Transit, which features new Middle Eastern writing and visual culture, and includes Transit Beirut (2004) and Transit Tehran (2008), the latter co-edited with Maziar Bahari. She co-curated three exhibitions of Syria’s art of resistance in 2012–13 in Amsterdam, Copenhagen and London. Her essays, publications, exhibitions and lectures showcase the culture and politics of a complex and changing Middle East.

Rodrigo Hasbún

Rodrigo Hasbún

Books

Affections

Rodrigo Hasbún is a Bolivian writer born in 1981. He has published two novels and a collection of short stories; he was selected by the 2007 Hay Festival as one of the Bogotá 39, and in 2010 was listed by Granta as one of the twenty best writers in Spanish under the age of 35. Two of his stories have been made into films. Affections is his second novel and will be published in ten languages.

Jean Hatzfeld

Jean Hatzfeld

Books

Into the Quick of Life

Jean Hatzfeld was born in Madagascar in 1949. His Jewish parents had fled there from the Nazis 7 years previously, but the family eventually returned to the Auvergne region. In 1977 he started to work as journalist for the French daily Libération among others.

Hatzfeld worked as a special correspondent and war reporter throughout eastern Europe, from the advent of Solidarnosc in Poland until the fall of Berlin’s Wall, covering the Velvet Revolution in former Czechoslovakia and the fall of the Ceausescu regime in Romania.

For 25 years, since the end of 1970s, he mainly worked in the Middle East, including Lebanon, Israel and Iraq. He spent three years in countries of Former Yugoslavia, between Vukovar and Sarajevo. In Sarajevo he was seriously injured through a Kalashnikov salvo. Hatzfeld published two books set against this background: L’Air de la guerre (1994), evoking his experiences in the former Yugoslavia; and La guerre au bord du fleuve (1999), a novel inspired by the war. He also worked in Haiti, Congo, Algeria, Burundi and Iran.

In 1994, he travelled to Rwanda to report about the massacre there, and its aftermath, for Libération. He later decided to leave daily journalism in order to focus solely on research into the genocide.  He published Dans le nu de la vie in 2000, in which he reports the stories of Tutsi survivors. The volume was awarded the Prix Culture 2000, the Prix Pierre Mille and the Prix France Culture. Hatzfeld said that after the publication of his first volume, readers expressed interest in hearing the voices of the Hutu perpetrators. Two years later, his conversations with condemned Hutus culminated in Une Saison de machettes, for which he won the essay category of the Prix Femina in 2003 and the Prix Jossef Kessel in 2004. He divides his time between Rwanda and Paris.

He won the 2006  T.R. Fyvel Book Award – Free expression award from Index on Censorship – for his books on the Rwandan genocide.

Yuri Herrera

Yuri Herrera

Books

The Transmigration of the Bodies

Born in Actopan, Mexico, in 1970, Yuri Herrera studied Politics in Mexico, Creative Writing in El Paso and took his PhD in literature at Berkeley. His first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, was published to great critical acclaim in 2015 and included in many Best-of-Year lists, including the Guardian‘s Best Fiction and NBC News’s Ten Great Latino Books. He is currently teaching at the University of Tulane, in New Orleans.

Vigdis Hjorth

Vigdis Hjorth

Books

A House in Norway

Vigdis Hjorth (born 19 July 1959) is a Norwegian novelist. She grew up in Oslo, and studied philosophy, literature and political science. In 1983, she published her first novel, the children’s book Pelle-Ragnar i den gule gården, for which she received Norsk kulturråd’s debut award. Her first book for an adult audience was Drama med Hilde (1987). Om bare from 2001 is considered her most important novel, and a roman à clef.[1]

Andrea C. Hoffmann

Andrea C. Hoffmann

Books

The Girl Who Beat ISIS

 

Andrea C. Hoffman is a Middle East expert, specialising in the situation of women in Muslim countries. She co-wrote The Voice of Freedom, the memoir by the wife of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and other international prizes which champion human rights.

Alois Hotschnig

Alois Hotschnig

Books

Ludwig's Room

Named the ‘best writer of his generation’ by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Alois Hotschnig was born in 1959 in Carinthia and lives in Innsbruck. His books, celebrated for their stylistic virtuosity and precision of observation, have won major Austrian and international prizes including the Federal Chancellery of Austria’s Literature Prize, the Italo Svevo Prize, the Erich Fried Prize, the Anton Wildgans Prize, the inaugural 2011 Gert Jonke Prize, and the ORF Radio Play of the Year Award, among others. These awards reflect Hotschnig’s mastery in examining universal concerns through the prism of an acute focus on the local.

Jacek Hugo-Bader

Jacek Hugo-Bader

Books

Kolyma Diaries

Born in 1957, Jacek Hugo-Bader is a Polish journalist for the leading daily paper, Gazeta Wyborcza. He is a former special needs teacher, loader of trucks, weigher of pigs, and counsellor of troubled couples. He lives in Warsaw. White Fever is his first book to be translated into English.

Petra Hůlová

Petra Hůlová

Books

Three Plastic Rooms

Petra Hůlová’s novels, plays, and screenplays have won numerous awards, and she is a regular commentator on current events for the Czech press. She studied language, culture, and anthropology at universities in Prague, Ulan Bator, and New York, and was a Fulbright scholar in the USA. Her eight novels and two plays have been translated into more than ten languages. Three Plastic Rooms is her second novel to be translated into English after   All This Belongs to Me  (2009).

Karmelo C. Iribarren

Karmelo C. Iribarren

Books

Poems the Wind Blew In

Karmelo C. Iribarren is a best-selling poet who has published twelve collections of poetry, as well as various volumes of his selected or complete poems. In prose, he has published Diario de K, which alternates aphorisms, prose poetry and picturesque observations about his city. Poems The Wind Blew In is his first (and so far only) collection of poems for younger readers.

Karmele Jaio

Karmele Jaio

Books

Her Mother's Hands

Karmele Jaio   (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1970) is the author of three books of short stories – Hamabost zauri   (Fifteen Wounds, Elkar, 2004),   Zu bezain ahul   (As Weak as You, Elkar, 2007) and   Ez naiz ni   (I’m Not Me, Elkar, 2012) – and two novels – Amaren eskuak   (Her Mother’s Hands, Elkar, 2006) and   Musika airean   (Music in the Air, Elkar, 2010). Her short stories have been published in many anthologies, including the recent Best European Fiction 2017 anthology.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

Tahar Ben Jelloun

Books

Leaving Tangier

A Palace in the Old Village

About My Mother

Tahar Ben Jelloun was born in Fez, Morocco in 1944. The year before Moroccan independence from France in 1956, his family moved to Tangier. He studied philosophy at the University of Rabat, and in 1966 was arrested alongside 94 other protestors for taking part in student demonstrations in Casablanca. He spent the following eighteen months in internment camps, here composing his first poetry. He occupied his mind with James Joyce’s Ulysses while in prison – a book smuggled in by his brother.

After his release, Ben Jalloun worked as a teacher of philosophy in Tetuan and Casablanca, before the government decreed that philosophy be taught only in classical Arabic. He sought exile in Paris in 1971, where he wrote for the magazine Souffles and studied for his doctorate in social psychology. His thesis on the sexual misery of North African immigrants in France was published in 1975 as The Highest Solitude. It was his first bestseller, though a prior novel, Harounda (1973) had already won him critical plaudits from Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes.

Ben Jalloun has written for a range of European newspapers, including France’s Le Monde, Italy’s La Repubblica and Spain’s El País. He is also the recipient of a number of literary accolades, including the Prix Goncourt for The Sacred Night (1987), and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for This Blinding Absence of Light (2001).

Dunja Jogan

Dunja Jogan

Books

Felix After the Rain

Dunja Jogan is an artist and graphic designer who has published several books and many editorial illustrations. Her work has been selected five times for the Italian Illustrators Annual. In 2015 her book The Elephant on the Tree was nominated for the Kristina Brenk Award for best original picture book in Slovenia. She lives in Trieste, Italy.

Laia Jufresa

Laia Jufresa

Books

Umami

Born in Mexico City, Laia Jufresa grew up in Veracruz and spent her adolescence in Paris. Her work has been featured in several anthologies and magazines such as Letras Libres, PEN Atlas, Words Without Borders and McSweeney’s, and she was named one of the most outstanding young writers in Mexico as part of the project México20. In 2015 she was invited by the British Council to be the first ever International Writer in Residence at the Hay Festival of Literature. She currently lives in Cologne, Germany.

Ismail Kadare

Ismail Kadare

Books

The Traitor's Niche

A Girl In Exile

The Accident

The Siege

Isil Kadare was born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, in the south of Albania. His first novel, The General of the Dead Army, established him as a major new voice in literature, and translations of his novels have since been published in more than forty countries. In 2005 he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize.

Han Kang

Han Kang

Books

Human Acts

Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, was published by Portobello Books in 2015, and her second novel to be translated into English, Human Acts, is published by Portobello in 2016. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Kyeong-ae Kang

Kyeong-ae Kang

Books

The Underground Village

Samir Kassir

Samir Kassir

Books

Being Arab

Samir Kassir (1960-2005) was one of Lebanon’s best-known journalists and historians. A columnist for the daily newspaper An-Nahar, he also wrote regularly for Le Monde Diplomatique and published a number of important works in French, including a history of Beirut, and a study of the Lebanese civil war. One of the most prominent voices on the Arab left, Kassir was a strong campaigner for the Palestinian cause, and a vocal critic of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. He was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut on Thursday 2 June 2005.

Sema Kaygusuz

Sema Kaygusuz

Books

The Well of Trapped Words

Sema Kaygusuz is one of Turkey’s leading female writers. Her debut novel, Yere Düsen Dualar (Wine and Gold) won international recognition upon publication in 2006. In 2007, she wrote the screenplay for Yesim Ustaoglu’s film Pandora’nin Kutusu (Pandora’s Box), which won the Golden Shell at the 2008 International Film Festival in San Sebastian. Her first short story collection, Ortadan Yarisindan (In the Middle of the Half, 2007) explored the struggles of characters grappling with disagreeable or concealed aspects of their personalities. The two following collections, Sandik Lekesi (Box Stain) and Doyma Noktasi (Saturation Point), established Sema Kaygusuz as a distinctive voice in the canon of young Turkish literature in the new millennium, which concerns itself increasingly with questions of identity and individuality.

Her novel, Yüzünde Bir Yer (A Spot on Your Face), was inspired by her own grandmother, and deals with the feelings of shame and guilt experienced by someone who survives a massacre. Kaygusuz is a recipient of both the Cevdet-Kudret-Literature Award and the France-Turquie Literary Award.

Orhan Kemal

Orhan Kemal

Books

The Idle Years and My Father's House

Orhan Kemal was born in Adana, Turkey in 1914. His father, a political activist, emigrated to Syria, leaving his son unable to complete his education and forced to do menial jobs. During his military service in 1939 Kemal was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for his political views. In prison he befriended poet Nazım Hikmet, who greatly influenced Kemal’s socialist politics and his commitment to writing. He moved to Istanbul in 1951 and began to write full time. His works concentrate on the struggles of ordinary people: the problems of farm and factory workers, the alienation of migrant workers in big cities, the lives of prison inmates, blind devotion to duty, child poverty and the repression and exploitation of women. He was the author of thirty-eight works of fiction, several of which have been filmed or turned into plays. He died in Sophia in 1970 and is buried in Istanbul.

Walter Kempowski

Walter Kempowski

Books

Swansong 1945

All for Nothing

Walter Kempowski (1929-2007) was one of Germany’s most important post-war writers. He settled after the war in Hamburg, but on returning to his home town of Rostock in the late 1940s he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for espionage by a Soviet military tribunal, of which he served eight years, in Bautzen. His first success as an author was the autobiographic novel Tadellöser & Wolff (1971) part of his acclaimed series of novels German Chronicles. In the 1980s he began work on an immense project, Echo Soundings, gathering together first hand accounts, diaries, letters and memoirs of the second world war, which he collated and curated into ten volumes published over 20 years, and which is considered a modern classic. Swansong 1945, published in Germany in 2005, and translated into English here for the first time, is the final volume of that work.

Etgar Keret

Etgar Keret

Books

The Seven Good Years

Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Etgar Keret is a leading voice in Israeli literature and cinema. He is the author of five bestselling story collections, which have been translated into thirty-five languages. His writing has been published in the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Paris Review and Esquire. He has also written a number of screenplays, and Jellyfish, his first film as a director alongside his wife Shira Geffen, won the Caméra d’Or prize for best first feature at Cannes in 2007. In 2010 he was awarded the Chevalier medallion of France’s Order of Arts and Letters.  www.etgarkeret.com

Farida Khalaf

Farida Khalaf

Books

The Girl Who Beat ISIS

Farida Khalaf and her brothers were brought up in the Yazidi community in Kocho, Iraq. Farida was 19 years old when ISIS attacked her village, killed the men, captured the women and sold them into slavery. After four months, Farida and her best friend managed to escape against all odds.

Elias Khoury

Elias Khoury

Books

Gate of the Sun

Yalo

Elias Khoury was born in Beirut 1948 and is one of the most distinguished writers and intellectuals in the contemporary Arab world. Khoury received degrees in History and Sociology. He founded several literary magazines and served as the cultural editor of the Beirut’s daily al-Safir. He is currently the editor of the weekly literary supplement of the newspaper al-Nahar. He has taught at the American University in Beirut, Columbia University, and New York University.

He is the author of eleven novels including Little Mountain, Gates of the City and The Journey of Little Gandhi, two plays (which have been performed in Beirut, Cairo, Paris, Vienna, and Basel), as well as several volumes of critical essays and short stories. Many of his works have been published in France with Actes Sud and Arlea, including La Porte du Soleil.

He was the artistic director of the Theatre of Beirut for six years and is now co-director of the Ayloul Theatre Festival in Beirut.  He is one of the 14 Arab intellectuals (including Edward Said and poets Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis) who signed a statement in protest of a neo-nazi conference that was to be held in Beirut.

Esther Kinsky

Esther Kinsky

Books

River

Esther Kinsky grew up by the river Rhine and lived in London for twelve years. She is the author of three volumes of poetry and two novels (Summer Resort and Banatsko) and has translated many notable English and Polish authors into German. River won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize 2016, the Franz Hessel Prize 2014, the Kranichsteiner Literature Prize 2015 and the SWR Prize for the best fiction book 2015, and was longlisted for the German Book Prize 2014.

Natsuo Kirino

Natsuo Kirino

Books

The Goddess Chronicle

Natsuo Kirino, born in Japan in 1951, is the author of twenty-one novels, four short-stories collections and an essay collection. She is the recipient of seven of Japan’s premier literary awards including the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Out and the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature for Grotesque. Her work has been published in twenty-eight languages worldwide and several of her books have also been turned into movies. Out was the first of her novels to appear in English and was nominated for an Edgar Award. She lives in Tokyo.

Fatos Kongoli

Fatos Kongoli

Books

The Loser

Born 1944 in and author of four novels, Fatos Kongoli is considered one of the most forceful and convincing representatives of contemporary Albanian literature. The Loser is his first novel. His work has been translated to critical acclaim in French, German, Italian, Greek and Slovak. Having studied in China, Kongoli worked as a mathematician during the Hoxa regime, preferring not to publish major works until that period ended, since when he has become one of the leading writers from Albania, recording the plight of that country and its people under the repressive Communist regime. When first published in 1992, in a comparatively large edition of 10,000 copies, The Loser found immediate success. It has been described as the most important Albanian novel to emerge from the post-Communist era.

Chan Koonchung

Chan Koonchung

Books

The Fat Years

Chan Koonchung was born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong. After working as a reporter at an English newspaper in Hong Kong, he founded the influential magazine City in 1976, where he was chief editor and then publisher for twenty three years. He is also a screenwriter and film producer of both Chinese and English-language films, a co-founder of the Hong Kong environmental group Green Power and a board member of Greenpeace International from 2008 to 2011. He lives in Beijing.

He recently funded the NGO, Minjian, which connects Chinese public intellectuals with their counterparts in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. The Fat Years is his first book, a portrait of China in 2013, when capitalism in the West has self-destructed, and the Chinese people are afflicted by temporary amnesia and a sinister optimism. The book has been banned in Koonchung’s homeland.

Alicia Kopf

Alicia Kopf

Books

Brother in Ice

Alicia Kopf, born Girona, 1982, holds degrees in Fine Arts and Comparative Literature. Brother in Ice is the culmination of an artistic cycle of several exhibitions entitled Àrticantàrtic, including a 2013 solo show in Barcelona, Seal Sounds Under The Floor. She has participated in many prestigious exhibitions. Her awards include the GAC-DKV Prize for best young artist gallery exhibition, the Premi Documenta literary prize, and the Premi Llibreter awarded by booksellers.

Ahmadou Kourouma

Ahmadou Kourouma

Books

Allah is Not Obliged

Ahmadou Kourouma was born in the Ivory Coast in 1927. Hailed as one of the leading African writers in French, he died in 2003.

Hanna Krall

Hanna Krall

Books

Chasing the King of Hearts

Hanna Krall was born in 1935 in Poland and survived the Second World War hiding in a cupboard. She began her writing career as a prize-winning journalist. Since the early ’80s she has worked as a novelist. She has received numerous Polish and international awards, such as the underground Solidarity Prize, Polish PEN Club Prize and the German Würth Preis for European Literature 2012. Translated into 17 languages, her work has gained widespread  recognition. In 2007 Król kier znów na wylocie (Chasing the King of Hearts) was shortlisted for the Angelus Central European Literary Award.

Abdellatif Laâbi

Abdellatif Laâbi

Books

Beyond the Barbed Wire

Abdellatif Laâbi is a poet, novelist, playwright, translator and political activist. He was born in Fez, Morocco in 1942. In the 1960s, Laâbi was the founding editor of Souffles, or Breaths, a widely influential literary review that was banned in 1972, at which point Laâbi was imprisoned for eight and a half years. Laâbi’s most recent accolades include the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie for his Oeuvres complètes (Collected Poems) in 2009, and the Académie française’s Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2011. His work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Turkish and English. Laâbi himself has translated into French the works of Mahmoud Darwish, Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, Mohammed Al-Maghout, Saâdi Youssef, Abdallah Zrika, Ghassan Kanafani and Qassim Haddad.

Asma Lamrabet

Asma Lamrabet

Books

Women in the Qur'an: an emancipatory reading

Asma Lamrabet is a pathologist in Avicenna Hospital, Rabat, Morocco. She is also an award-winning author of many articles and books tackling Islam and Women’s issues. Her primary focus is on re-reading Holy Scriptures from a woman’s perspective.

From 2004 to 2007, Asma Lamrabet was the coordinator of a research and reflection group on Muslim women and intercultural dialogue in Rabat. In 2008 she was appointed the president of GIERFI (International Group of Studies and Reflection on Women and Islam) in Barcelona. Since 2011 she is the Director of Studies and Research Centre on Women’s Issues in Islam of Rabita Mohammadia des Ulemas – Rabat (www.annisae.ma).

Claude Lanzmann

Claude Lanzmann

Books

The Patagonian Hare

Claude Lanzmann was born in Paris in 1925. He has a degree in philosophy, and studied at the University of Berlin from 1948-49. In 1952 he met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and began working at the journal, Les Temps Modernes, of which he is now the director. In 1970, after having worked as a journalist and editing of several television projects, Lanzmann became a documentary filmmaker. His first film Pouquoi Israel (Why Israel), is a repsonse, in part, to his former anti-colonialist comrades who refused to understand how someone who agitated for Algeria’s independence from France could also feverently support the survival of Israel. Lanzmann began working on Shoah during the summer of 1974; the film occupied him full time for 11 years.

Layla Al-Zubaidi

Layla Al-Zubaidi

Books

Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus

Layla Al-Zubaidi is Director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in South Africa, and was previously based in Beirut and Ramallah. She has published on cultural resistance and freedom of expression, and is co-editor of Democratic Transition in the Middle East: Unmaking Power (Routledge, 2012). She has also been on the Executive Committee of Freemuse — World Forum on Music and Censorship.

Luis Leante

Luis Leante

Books

See How Much I Love You

Luis Leante is a professor of classics at the University of Murcia in Spain. He has written plays, poetry, essays, film scripts and over a dozen novels, winning numerous literary awards. Mira Si Yo Te Querré was inspired by a 2005 humanitarian trip to the Western Sahara. In 2007 it won the Alfaguara prize for fiction.

Ron Leshem

Ron Leshem

Books

Beaufort

Ron Leshem, born in 1976, is a native of Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv. His novel Beaufort won the Sapir Prize – Israel’s top literary award – for 2006, as well as the Yitzhak Sadeh Prize for military literature. In 2002 he became deputy editor of Maariv newspaper and in 2006 joined the Channel Two television station as deputy director in charge of programming and special projects. Beaufort is his first novel.

Hanoch Levin

Hanoch Levin

Tatiana Salem Levy

Tatiana Salem Levy

Books

The House in Smyrna

Tatiana Salem Levy is a writer and translator. She was born in Lisbon and lives in Rio de Janeiro. In 2012 Granta named her one of the Best Young Brazilian Novelists, and her fiction, essays, and criticism have been published in Granta and online at The Paris Review. Levy holds a PhD in literature and has appeared at literary festivals around the world. The House in Smyrna is her first novel, and it won Brazil’s largest award — the São Paulo Prize for Literature — for the best debut. It has been translated into French, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, and Turkish, and has sold more than 50,000 copies worldwide.

Yang Lian

Yang Lian

Books

Narrative Poem

Yang Lian was one of the original Misty Poets who reacted against the strictures of the Cultural Revolution. Born in Switzerland, the son of a diplomat, he grew up in Beijing and began writing when he was sent to the countryside in the 1970s. On his return he joined the influential literary magazine Jintian (Today). His work was criticised in China in 1983 and formally banned in 1989 when he organised memorial services for the dead of Tiananmen while in New Zealand. He was a Chinese poet in exile from 1989 to 1995, finally settling in London in 1997. Translations of his poetry include four collections with Bloodaxe, Where the Sea Stands Still (1999), Concentric Circles (2005), Lee Valley Poems (2009) and Narrative Poem (2017). He was awarded the International Nonino Prize in 2012.

Rosa Liksom

Rosa Liksom

Books

Compartment No.6

Rosa Liksom was born 1958 in Lapland, Finland to a family of farmers and reindeer breeders. A renowned painter, cartoonist, children’s writer and filmmaker, she is best known as a prize-winning writer whose books have been translated into more than 15 languages. After living in Kristiania, Copenhagen, where she wrote her first novel, as well as Norway, Iceland, Paris, Brezhnev-era Moscow and in squats and communes throughout Europe, she returned to Helsinki, Finland, in 1987. She won the 2011 Finlandia Prize for Compartment No. 6.

Jonathan Littell

Jonathan Littell

Books

Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising

Jonathan Littell was born in 1967 in New York, of American parents and brought up and educated mainly in France. His novel The Kindly Ones, originally published in France as Les Bienveillants, became a best seller and won the coveted Prix Goncourt and the Academie Francaise’s Prix de Litterature. Previously he worked for the Humanitarian agency Action contre la Faim, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and the DR of Congo. He now lives in Barcelona, Spain.

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Books

Negative Space

Luljeta Lleshanaku was born in Elbasan, Albania in 1968. Under Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship, she grew up under house arrest. Lleshanaku was not permitted to attend college or publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the regime in the early 1990s. She was eventually able to study Albanian philology and literature at the University of Tirana, and later attended the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, USA. She has worked as a school teacher, literary magazine editor, screenwriter, television author and currently as a research director at the Institute of Studies of Communist Genocide in Albania. She was a fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1999, and received a fellowship from Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2008-2009.

She has won several prestigious awards for her poetry, including PEN Albania 2016 (from Albanian PEN Center), National Prize ‘Silver Pen, 2000’ for poetry, and the International Kristal Vilenica Prize (International Festival of Literature, Slovenia 2009). She was one of the winners of Prishtina Book Fair, 2013 (Kosovo); the winner of KULT Prize, 2013 in Albania for the best book of the year and was awarded ‘Author of the Year’ by the Publishers Association of Tirana Book Fair, 2013. Her second American collection, Child of Nature, was one of 2011 BTBA (Best Translated Book Award) poetry finalists. In 2012 she was one of two finalists in Poland for their European Poet of Freedom prize.

She has published seven books of poetry in Albanian, and so far seven poetry collections translated into other languages.

Lost Evenings, Lost Lives poets

Lost Evenings, Lost Lives poets

Books

Lost Evenings, Lost Lives

The 32 poets in this anthology are drawn from both older and younger generations of Tamil poets and from all the main religions of the region and they are represented here by poems covering the years 1977-2014, from the beginning of the conflict to the ‘peace’ of the post-war years. Thus, there are nearly three decades of war separating the poets born before 1955 (among them M.A. Nuhman, A. Jesurasa, A. Sankari, Captain Vaanathi, Dushyanthan, Urvashi, K.P. Aravinthan, S. Vilvaratnam, S. Sivasegaram, V.I.S. Jayapalan and Thirumaavalavan), some of whom lived through the entire period but still remembered a time of peace and idyllic beauty, and the younger poets born in the thick of the war who lived through the years of conflict as children and young adults. Among these younger poets are P. Ahilan, Avvai, Anaar, Aazhiyaal, Balassoorian, Cheran, Faheema Jahan, Theeva Abira, Theebachelvan, Sharmila Seyyid, Malathi Maithri, Karunakaran, Kutti Revathi, Rishan Sareef, Ravikumar, Rashmi and Thamilini.

Two of the anthologised poets, Vaanathi and Vilvaratnam, died during the war or immediately after, and a number of poets, including Aazhiyaal, K.P. Aravinthan (until his death in 2015), Avvai, Balassoorian, Cheran, Jayapalan, Rashmi, Theva Abira, Thirumaavalavan and Urvashi fled Sri Lanka as political refugees during the period of conflict, and now live (and write) as part of an international diaspora.

Women’s voices, those of A. Sankari, Sivaramani, Aazhiyal, Anaar, Avvai, Kutti Revathi, Sharmila Seyyid, Faheema Jahan, Latha, Malathi Maithri, Sukirtharani, Thamilini and Urvasi (among whom are a number of activists) are well represented in this anthology in poems which tell of the experiences of women during the war – of the break-up of families, of separation and death, of loss of home and property, of rape and other forms of violence against women – as well as in love poems, open in their expression of love and desire.

Other poetic voices which come to the fore in this anthology are those of the young Tamil Muslims, among them Solaikili, Rashmi, Anaar and Sharmila Seyyid, in poems that express the sorrow and suffering of the Muslim population of Sri Lanka as a result of their persecution and expulsion from their homeland in the north of the island by the Tamil Tigers in 1990.

Edouard Louis

Edouard Louis

Books

The End of Eddy

Born Eddy Bellegueule in Hallencourt, France, in 1992, Edouard Louis is the author of two novels and the editor of a book on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. His work has appeared in Freeman’s and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His bestselling debut novel, The End of Eddy, has been translated into twenty languages, and has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.

Fatos Lubonja

Fatos Lubonja

Books

The False Apocalypse

Fatos Lubonja is a writer and editor of the quarterly journal Përpjekja (Endeavor), representative of the Forum for Democracy, and a leading figure in Albania’s political life. At twenty-three, Lubonja was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for ‘agitation and propaganda’ after police found his diaries, which contained criticisms of the dictator, Hoxha. He was re-sentenced without trial and spent a total of 17 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, and was released in 1991. Lubonja’s first book in English, Second Sentence: Inside the Albanian Gulag, was published to great acclaim by I. B. Tauris in 2006. He is also the author of a number of books which have been translated into Italian, German, English and Polish. Among his many literary prizes, he received the Alberto Moravia Prize for International Literature in 2002 and the Herder Prize for Literature in 2004. His first title with Istros – False Apocalypse – includes a foreword by the Guardian/Huffington Post journalist and author, Andrew Gumbel.

Guus Luijters

Guus Luijters

Books

Song of Stars

Guus Luijters is a historian, writer and poet. He has published more than thirty books, including   In Memoriam: the deported and murdered Jewish, Roma and Sinti children 1942-45,   Rapenbugerstraat   1940-1945   and   Kinderkroniek 1940-1945: Letters, testimony and diaries from the Shoah. He writes a daily column for the newspaper Het Parool.

Alain Mabanckou

Alain Mabanckou

Books

The Lights of Pointe-Noire

Black Moses

Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo. An award-winning novelist, poet and essayist, Mabanckou currently lives in LA, where he teaches literature at UCLA. His four novels African Psycho, Broken Glass, Black Bazaar and Tomorrow I Will Be Twenty – a fictionalised retelling of Mabanckou’s childhood in Congo – are all published by Serpent’s Tail. In 2015, Mabanckou was listed as a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.

Sarah Maguire

Sarah Maguire

Books

My Voice

Sarah Maguire is the founder and director of The Poetry Translation Centre. She has published four highly acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto, 2007) which was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. Her selected poems, Almost the Equinox, will be published by Chatto in 2015.

Nawara Mahfoud

Nawara Mahfoud

Books

Syria Speaks

Nawara Mahfoud is a Syrian freelance journalist who has worked for the New York Times. She blogs for the New Yorker’s website, among other publications. She was a co-curator of the Culture in Defiance exhibition in Amsterdam, Copenhagen and London.

Mahi Binebine

Mahi Binebine

Books

Horses of God

Mahi Binebine was born in Marrakesh in 1959. He studied in Paris and taught mathematics until he became recognised, first as a painter, then as a novelist. Between 1994-1999 he lived in New York, when his paintings began to be acquired by the Guggenheim Museum. He has published several novels.

Ruth Maier

Ruth Maier

Books

Ruth Maier's Diary

Ruth Maier was born into a middle-class Jewish family in interwar Vienna. Following the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, the world of the substantial Viennese Jewish community crumbled. In early 1939, her sister having left for England, Ruth emigrated to Norway and lived with a family in Lillestrøm, about thirty miles from Oslo. Norway itself became a Nazi conquest in April 1940, and Ruth was deported to Auschwitz in November 1942, where she was killed on arrival, aged only twenty-two. Ruth’s close friend, the Norwegian poet Gunvor Hofmo kept her diaries and much of her correspondence. After Hofmo’s death in 1995, Jan Erik Vold went through her papers and found Ruth’s diaries. After editing them for ten years, they were published in Norway in 2007.

Bernat Manciet

Bernat Manciet

Books

The November Boy

Bernat Manciet, born in Sabres in 1923, was a poet, novelist and dramatist – one of the most important Occitan writers of the twentieth century and a major figure in European literature. Immersed in the classics, the long history of Gascon literature and the great contemporary writers of Europe, Manciet patiently helped construct a modernist Occitan literature. His first collection of poetry, Accidents (1955), caused shock waves within Occitan literature with its formal experimentation and stream-of-consciousness lyricism. First published in the journal Òc in 1964, The November Boy (Lo gojat de noveme) was a major success in forging a specifically Gascon-language literary prose that responded to the universal concerns of the modern age.

Marina Mander

Marina Mander

Books

The First True Lie

Marina Mander is the author of two previous books, including a collection of short stories. Her debut novel, The First True Lie, is her first book to be published in English. She works in publishing in Italy.

Susana Moreira Marques

Susana Moreira Marques

Books

Now and at the Hour of Our Death

Susana Moreira Marques is a writer and journalist. She was born in Oporto in 1976 and now lives in Lisbon, where she writes for Público and Jornal de Negócios.

Between 2005 and 2010 Moreira Marques lived in London, working at the BBC World Service while also a correspondent for Portuguese newspaper Público. Her journalism has won several prizes, including the Prémio AMI – Jornalismo Contra a Indiferença and the 2012 UNESCO ‘Human Rights and Integration’ Journalism Award (Portugal).

Now and at the Hour of Our Death is her first book.

 

Tomás Eloy Martínez

Tomás Eloy Martínez

Books

Purgatory

Tomás Eloy Martínez was born in Argentina in 1934. During the military dictatorship, he lived in exile in Venezuela where he wrote his first three books, all of which were republished in Argentina in 1983, in the first months of democracy. In 2005, he was shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize. He was a professor and director of the Latin American Program at Rutgers University. He died in January 2010.

Irina Mashinski

Irina Mashinski

Books

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

Irina Mashinski is a bilingual poet and translator, and the author of nine books of poetry in Russian. Her work has appeared in Poetry International, Fulcrum, Zeek and The London Magazine amongst others and has been translated into several languages. She is co-founder (with the late Oleg Woolf) and editor-in-chief of the StoSvet/Cardinal Points literary project, the editor of the Storony Sveta Literary Journal and co-editor of the Cardinal Points Journal. She received the Russian America (2001) and Maximilian Voloshin (2003) Awards in poetry, and, with Boris Dralyuk, First Prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition. Mashinski holds a Ph.D. in Physical Geography from Lomonosov Moscow State University and an M.F.A. in Poetics from New England College.

She lives in the US.

Matsuda Aoko

Matsuda Aoko

Books

Where the Wild Ladies Are

Aoko Matsuda is a writer and translator. In 2013, her debut book, Stackable, was nominated for the Mishima Yukio Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize. In 2019, her short story ‘The Woman Dies’ (from the collection The Year of No Wild Flowers), published on GRANTA online, was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. Her novella The Girl Who Is Getting Married was published by Strangers Press in 2016. She has translated work by Karen Russell, Amelia Gray and Carmen Maria Machado into Japanese.

Margaret Mazzantini

Margaret Mazzantini

Books

Morning Sea

Margaret Mazzantini was born in Dublin and lives in Rome with her husband and four children. She has written seven novels, all international bestsellers, which have won numerous awards and been translated into over thirty languages. Twice Born (also published by Oneworld), won the Premio Campiello award, sold over one million copies, and was made into an international film directed by Sergio Castellitto, starring Penelope Cruz and Emile Hirsch.

Senait Mehari

Senait Mehari

Books

Heart of Fire

Senait Mehari  lives in Berlin, Heart of Fire is her first book. A memoir, the book traces her eventful life from her birth in Asmara, Eritrea, to her current life in Germany.

Her first passion is music. In 2005 she released her second CD, Mein Weg, with Polydor Germany, to remarkable acclaim. A follow-up album is underway, this time she will sing in her native Tigrinya.

Alberto Méndez

Alberto Méndez

Books

Blind Sunflowers

Alberto Méndez was born in 1941 in Madrid. He studied in Rome and graduated in Literature and Philosophy from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He always worked in national and international publishing companies. His book Los Girasoles Ciegos was published in 2004. Alberto Méndez was awarded the Setenil Prize for the title (a prize for the best short-story book published in Spain), The Critic’s Prize, which for the first time was awarded to a posthumous book in 2005 (the author died in 2004), and the National Prize for Literature.

Alen Mešković

Alen Mešković

Books

Ukulele Jam

Alen Mešković was born in Bosnia in 1977 and has lived in Denmark since 1994. His debut publication was the critically acclaimed poetry collection Første gang tilbage (First Time Back) in 2009. His first novel, Ukulele Jam (2011) was nominated for the literary award Weekendavisens Litteraturpris. It has been published in nine countries, including Germany, where it is also a long-running theatre production. In 2012, Alen Mešković was awarded a three year working grant by the Danish Arts Foundation for the novel. Published in 2016, One-Man Tent, a stand-alone sequel of Ukulele Jam, is being translated into five languages.

Clemens Meyer

Clemens Meyer

Books

Bricks and Mortar

Clemens Meyer was born 1977 in Halle and lives in Leipzig. After high school he jobbed as a watchman, building worker and removal man. He studied creative writing at the German Literary Institute, Leipzig and was granted a scholarship by the Saxon Ministry of Science and Arts in 2002. His first novel, Als wir träumten, was a huge success and for his second book, Die Nacht, die Lichter, a collection of short stories, he was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2008. Bricks and Mortar, his latest novel, was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and was awarded the Bremer Literaturpreis 2014.

Immanuel Mifsud

Immanuel Mifsud

Books

The Play of Waves

Immanuel Mifsud  is a poet and a writer born in Malta in 1967. He is the recipient of a number of awards: the Malta National Award for prose (2002, 2014), the Malta National Award for poetry (2013), and the European Union Prize for Literature (2011). Various works by Mifsud have been translated and published in a number of languages.

He holds a PhD from the University of Malta where he lectures in Maltese literature and literary theory.

Karim Miské

Karim Miské

Books

Arab Jazz

Born in 1964 in Abidjan to a Mauritanian father and a French mother, Karim Miské grew up in Paris before leaving to study journalism in Dakar. He now lives in France, and is making documentary films on a wide range of subjects including deafness, for which he learned sign language, and the common roots between the Jewish and Islamic religions. Arab Jazz is the author’s first novel.

Sara Moliner

Sara Moliner

Books

The Whispering City

Sara Moliner is the pseudonym for the writing duo Rosa Ribas and Sabine Hofmann. Rosa Ribas was born in 1963 in Barcelona, and since 1991 has lived in Frankfurt where she teaches at the university. She is the celebrated author of six previous novels. Sabine Hofmann was born in 1964 and is a former lecturer in philology at Frankfurt University. The Whispering City is their first novel together. Highly acclaimed in Spain, it will be published in several languages around the world.

Emiliano Monge

Emiliano Monge

Books

Among The Lost

Eugenio Montale

Eugenio Montale

Books

Xenia

Eugenio Montale (1896 – 1981) was a Nobel Laureate and a grandmaster of Italian modernist poetry. During WWI, Montale served as an infantry officer on the Austrian front. Originally Montale trained to be an opera singer, but when his voice teacher died in 1923, he gave up singing and concentrated his efforts on writing. After his first book, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), appeared in 1925, Montale was received by critics as a profoundly original and experimental poet. His style mixed archaic words with scientific terms and idioms from the vernacular. He was dismissed from his directorship of the Gabinetto Vieusseux research library in 1938 for refusing to join the Fascist party. He withdrew from public life and began translating English writers such as Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Herman Melville, and Eugene O’Neill. In 1939, Le occasioni (The Occasions) appeared, his most innovative book, followed by La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things, 1956). It was this trio of books that won Montale the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975 and established him as a founder of the hermetic school of Italian poetry.

Jean-Claude Mourlevat

Jean-Claude Mourlevat

Books

Jefferson

Jean-Claude Mourlevat was born in Ambert, Auvergne in 1952 in a farming family. He studied in Strasbourg, Toulouse, Bonn and Paris, and worked as a German teacher in college before becoming an actor. He performed as the clown character Guedoulde in a show that toured France and internationally and has also staged works by Brecht, Cocteau and Shakespeare. Jean-Claude Mourlevat turned to writing for children in the late 1990s and has since published numerous books for young readers and won several awards including the Prix des Incorruptibles and the Sorcières Prix

He lives near Saint-Étienne, with his wife and their two children.

Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Books

Tram 83

Fiston Mwanza Mujila was born in 1981 in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, where he went to a Catholic school before studying Literature and Human Sciences at Lubumbashi University. He now lives in Graz, Austria, and is pursuing a PhD in Romance Languages.

His writing has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Gold Medal at the 6th Jeux de la Francophonie in Beirut as well as the Best Text for Theater (Preis für das beste Stück, State Theater, Mainz) in 2010.

His poems, prose works, and plays are reactions to the political turbulence that has come in the wake of the independence of the Congo and its effect on day-to-day life. As he describes in one of his poems, his texts describe a ‘geography of hunger’: hunger for peace, freedom, and bread.

Tram 83, written in French and published in August 2014 as a lead title of the rentrée littéraire by Éditions Métailié, is his first novel. It has been shortlisted and has won numerous literary prizes in France, Austria, England, and the United States.

Matías Néspolo

Matías Néspolo

Books

Seven Ways to Kill a Cat

Matías Néspolo was born in Buenos Aires in 1975. He studied literature, going on to  write poems, short stories, journalism and then Seven Ways to Kill a Cat, his acclaimed first novel. He has been living in Barcelona since 2001 and, in 2010, was selected by Granta as one of their best young contemporary Spanish-language novelists.

Sandra Rodríguez Nieto

Sandra Rodríguez Nieto

Books

The Story of Vicente, Who Murdered His Mother, His Father, and His Sister: Life and Death in Juárez

Sandra Rodríguez Nieto began reporting for the Ciudad Juárez daily newspaper El Diario in 2003. She has received the Reporteros Del Mundo prize from the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, the Knight International Journalism Award from the International Center for Journalists, and the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting. She was a Harvard University Nieman Fellow in 2014. She now reports for Sin Embargo.

Lars-Henrik Olsen

Lars-Henrik Olsen

Books

Erik & the Gods: Journey to Valhalla

Lars-Henrik Olsen (born 30 July 1946) is a Danish author. His oeuvre spans children’s, youth and adult books. He has written books about animals and nature, Nordic mythology and several historical novels. Among his more notable books are the Erik series. His books have been translated into a total of 13 different languages. In 1976 he published several nature books including Life in the sea: a food chain and Life in the forest: a circuit. His debut fiction novel was Wolves and then followed a series of books with animals and nature as a theme. In 1986 he was awarded The Danish Bookstores Auxiliary Society of Children’s Book Prize for Erik Menneskeson. In 1988 this was followed by The dwarf from Normandy which won Denmark’s school librarian Society of Children’s Book Prize. Since then he has written a wealth of books, many of which are inspired by the Vikings, Norse mythology and medieval times.

Zaher Omareen

Zaher Omareen

Books

Syria Speaks

Zaher Omareen is a Syrian researcher and writer who has published articles and short stories in the Arab and English press. His short story ‘First Safety Manoeuvre’ won a prize awarded by the Danish Institute in Damascus and by the 2012 Copenhagen Festival of Literature. He has worked on independent cultural initiatives in Syria and Europe, and co-curated exhibitions on the art of the Syrian uprising. He studied Media, Journalism and Theatrical and Dramatic Arts in Damascus, and holds an MA in Media and Cultural Studies from Sussex University. He is a PhD candidate in Contemporary Documentary Cinema and New Media at Goldsmiths College, London, and is completing Tales of the Orontes River, a collection of short stories drawn from the collective memories of the 1982 Hama massacre.

Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Books

The Bridge of the Golden Horn

Born in Malatya in Turkey, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, lived in a number of towns before her parents finally settled in Istanbul. Still a teenager and unable to speak a word of German, she went to Germany in 1965 as a Gastarbeiter to save up to go to drama school. Özdamar returned to Turkey, studied acting, became involved in radical politics and left Turkey for Berlin again during the period of military repression in the 1970′s. She acted on stage in Berlin, Paris, Avignon, and Dusseldorf and appeared in a number of films. She first wrote plays, before publishing stories and novels in German which have won numerous prizes and been translated into several languages. She lives in Berlin.

Emmanuelle Pagano

Emmanuelle Pagano

Books

Trysting

Emmanuelle Pagano was born in 1969 in the Aveyron region of southern France, she now lives and works on the Ardèche plateau. She studied fine art and the aesthetics of cinema, and regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines such as dance, cinema, photography, illustration, fine art and music. Emmanuelle has written more than a dozen works of fiction, and her books have been translated into more than twelve languages. She has won the EU Prize for Literature.

Intan Paramaditha

Intan Paramaditha

Books

The Wandering

Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian writer now based in Sydney. She is the acclaimed author of two short story collections, Sihir Perempuan (2005) and Kumpulan Budak Setan (2010, with Eka Kurniawan and Ugoran Prasad), from which the stories in her first collection in English, Apple and Knife, are drawn. Her fiction has received awards in Indonesia, including the Kompas Best Short Story Award, Tempo Best Literary Fiction of the Year, and Khatulistiwa Literary Awards shortlist. She holds a PhD from New York University and teaches Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University. The Wandering is her debut novel. intanparamaditha.com

Shahrnush Parsipur

Shahrnush Parsipur

Books

Touba and the Meaning of Night

Shahrnush Parsipur was born in 1946 in Tehran, Iran. She published her first short stories in literary magazines at the age of 16, and went on to write essays, story collections, and several novels. She received her B.A. in sociology from Tehran University in 1973 and studied Chinese language and civilization at the Sorbonne from 1976 to 1980. She was arrested for the first time in 1974, by the Shah’s intelligence agency, and would be jailed three additional times under the Islamic Republic. She began writing Touba and the Meaning of Night while imprisoned in Iran.

Touba and the Meaning of Night was published in Iran in 1989 to great critical acclaim and instant bestseller status until Parsipur was again arrested a year later, and all her works banned by the Islamic Republic.

Parsipur now lives in the USA and writes in exile in the San Francisco Bay area.

Norman Erikson Pasaribu

Norman Erikson Pasaribu

Books

Sergius Seeks Bacchus

Ihor Pavlyuk

Ihor Pavlyuk

Books

A Flight Over the Black Sea

Ihor Pavlyuk was born in the Volyn region of Ukraine in January 1967 and studied at the St Petersburg Military University, which he left in order to pursue his career as a writer. He was as a result sentenced to a period of hard labour in the Taiga working on what was literally a road to nowhere but regained his liberty in the chaos accompanying the fall of the Soviet Union. He was able subsequently to complete his education and become a Doctor of Social Communication.  His numerous poetry collections include Islands of youth (Ukrainian Острови юності) (1990), Magma (Ukrainian Магма)  (2005), Ukraine at smoke (Ukrainian Україна  в диму) (2009), Masculine fortunetelling (Ukrainian Чоловічe ворожіння) (2013). His work has been translated into several languages including English, French, Polish, Russian and Japanese.

Daniel Pennac

Daniel Pennac

Books

School Blues

Diary of a Body

Daniel Pennac was born in 1944 in Casablanca, Morocco. Educated in Southern France, he struggled at school, but his love of literature inspired him to persevere. He later became a secondary school teacher in Nice, France, experimenting with varied and unusual techniques. As a teacher, Pennac was determined to provide the support to young pupils that he was denied as a child.

His first book for children, Le grand rex, was published in 1980. He has now published over 30 books, including novels for both adults and children, comic-books, picture-books and essays. Many of these have been translated into more than 30 languages. In 1990, Le petite marchande de prose was named one of the best novels of the year by Le Figaro, and Pennac won the Prix Inter. Pennac has worked with renowned illustrator Quentin Blake on numerous occasions, producing masterpieces such as The Rights of the Reader.

Antonio Pennacchi

Antonio Pennacchi

Books

The Mussolini Canal

Antonio Pennacchi still lives in Latina outside Rome, where he was born in 1950. For most of his life he worked on the nightshift of a local factory before his success as a writer allowed him to leave. His first novel Il Fasciocommunista (2003) won the Premio Napoli and was turned into a major feature film. His second novel The Mussolini Canal (2010) won The Strega Prize and has been one of the most successful literary novels published in Italy in recent years.

Rao Pingru

Rao Pingru

Books

Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China Read

Rao Pingru is ninety-five years old. He lives in Shanghai, China. Our Story is his first book.

Peter Pišťanek

Peter Pišťanek

Peter Pišťanek was born in Slovakia in 1960; he enrolled in Bratislava’s Academy of Performing Arts, but did not graduate. His breakthrough came in 1991 with Rivers of Babylon, the first part of a trilogy. The Wooden Village followed in 1994, and the third novel in the series, The End of Freddy was published in 1999. In 1993 he published three novellas, of which Young Dônč is regarded as a masterpiece. Younger Slovak readers by then acknowledged Peter Pišťanek as their most flamboyant and fearless writer, stripping the nation of its myths and false self-esteem. But hostility from the critical and political establishment, as well as a Czech travesty of a filming of Rivers of Babylon, led the author to move away from literature into journalism, and then into translation.

Anna Politkovskaya

Anna Politkovskaya

Books

Putin's Russia

Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist, author and human rights activist. She received her Diploma in Journalism from Moscow State University in 1980 and worked on a number of newspapers as a correspondent and editor, including as special correspondent for the Russian twice-weekly newspaper Novaya Gazeta. She had a particular interest in Chechnya, and wrote extensively on the subject, including the book A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya (Harvill, 2001).  She acted as a mediator in the Nord-Ost theatre siege in Moscow in 2002, and was the recipient of numerous international honours, including:

  • First Prize of the Lettre Ulysses Award (2003)
  • Hermann-Kesten Medal, PEN Germany (2003)
  • Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation (2002)
  • Most Courageous Defence of Free Expression from Index on Censorship (2002)
  • Special Award of Amnesty International (2001)

On 7 October 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building. English PEN were hugely saddened by the news of her assassination. We continue to campaign for the right to freedom of expression.

Alek Popov

Alek Popov

Books

Mission London

Alek Popov was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1966. He graduated from St. Constantine Ciril Philosopher College for Ancient Languages and Cultures in Sofia and later received his Masters of Arts degree in Bulgarian Language and Literature from the University of Sofia.

Alek published his first collection of short stories The Other Death in 1992.  Through the years he has contributed to numerous publications and has produced six collections of short stories. His first novel Mission: London, based on colourful impressions from being the Cultural Attaché at the Bulgarian Embassy in the United Kingdom, was published in 2001. It has been widely acclaimed as “the funniest contemporary Bulgarian book” for its sarcastic projection of the Bulgarian diplomatic elite.

He has won several literary awards including the National Radio’s Pavel Veshinov Award for the best criminal short story; the Graviton Award for best science fiction; the Raško Sugarev Award for best short story; the prize Helicon for best prose book of the year, 2002; the annual prize of Clouds magazine for the English translation of Mission London, 2004; and most recently the National Prize for Drama Ivan Radoev.

Alek’s short stories have been have been translated into German, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Chez, French, Danish, English and Turkish. His novel Mission London was published in Serbian from Geopoetica publishing house and in Hungarian from Kijarat Kiado. It is currently prepared for print in France.

Today Alek is one of the most popular young writers in Bulgaria with a broad range of creative interests. He continues to focus on prose, but also authors screenplays and facilitates various creative workshops.

Nicola Pugliese

Nicola Pugliese

Books

Malacqua

Nicola Pugliese  was born in Milan in 1944, but lived almost all his life in Naples. A journalist, his first and only novel, Malacqua, was published in 1977 by Italo Calvino. It sold out in days, but, at the author’s request, was never reprinted until after his death in 2012.

Nayrouz Qarmout

Nayrouz Qarmout

Books

The Sea Cloak

Nayrouz Qarmout is a Palestinian writer and activist. Born in Damascus in 1984, as a Palestinian refugee, she returned to the Gaza Strip, as part of the 1994 Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement, where she now lives. She graduated from al-Azhar University in Gaza with a degree in Economics. She currently works in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, raising awareness of gender issues and promoting the political and economic role of women in policy and law, as well as the defence of women from abuse, and highlighting the role of women’s issues in the media. Her political, social and literary articles have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, and online. She has also written screenplays for several short films dealing with women’s rights. She is a social activist and a member of several youth initiatives, campaigning for social change in Palestine.

Atiq Rahimi

Atiq Rahimi

Books

The Patience Stone

A Curse on Dostoevsky

Atiq Rahimi was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1962. His mother was a teacher, and his father was a provincial governor under the monarchy of Zahir Shah. After the coup of 1973, however, the king was overthrown and Afghanistan was declared a republic. Rahimi’s family went into exile, and after studying at the Franco-Afghan lycée, he joined his father in Bombay. In 1979, he returned to Afghanistan to read literature at the University of Kabul, and worked as a cinema critic.

In 1984, he relocated to Pakistan for a brief period, before seeking political asylum in France. He completed his PhD in audio-visual communications at the Sorbonne, and began writing Earth and Ashes in 1996. After 18 years in exile, Atiq Rahimi returned in February 2002 to Afghanistan and helped establish an Afghan writers’ centre in Kabul, with the assistance of the French government.

Rahimi is the recipient of a number of prestigious literary and film awards. In 2004, he won the Prix du Regard vers l’Avenir at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Dhow award for Best Feature Film at the Zanzibar International Film Festival for his film version of Earth and Ashes. In 2008, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt for The Patience Stone – France’s highest literary honour.

Agnes Ravatn

Agnes Ravatn

Books

The Bird Tribunal

Agnes Ravatn (b. 1983) is an author and columnist. She made her literary début with the novel Week 53 (Veke 53) in 2007. Since then she has written three critically acclaimed and award-winning essay collections: Standing still (Stillstand), 2011, Popular Reading (Folkelesnad), 2011, and Operation self-discipline (Operasjon sjøldisiplin), 2014. In these works Ravatn shows her unique, witty voice and sharp eye for human fallibility. Her second novel, The Bird Tribunal (Fugletribuanlet), 2013, is a strange and captivating thriller focussing on shame, guilt and atonement. Ravatn received the cultural radio P2’s listener’s prize for this novel, a popular and important prize in Norway, in addition to The Youth’s Critic’s Prize. The Bird Tribunal was also made into a successful play, which premiered in Oslo in 2015.

Eric Reinhardt

Eric Reinhardt

Books

The Victoria System

Eric Reinhardt is one of the rising stars of contemporary literature in France, hailed for his incisive portraits of contemporary society. Born in 1965, he is the author of four previous novels and a freelance publisher of art books. He lives and works in Paris. The Victoria System is his first novel to be translated into English.

Tore Renberg

Tore Renberg

Books

See You Tomorrow

Tore Renberg is a multi-award-winning author, who has distinguished himself as a literary critic and TV host for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. A student of philosophy and literature at the University of Bergen, where he met lifelong friend Karl Ove Knausgård, he first achieved major success at the age of 23, with the now legendary short-story collection Sleeping Triangle and then the novel The Man Who Loved Yngve, which was made into a major motion picture. This was followed by four further novels with the same protagonist, selling over 400,000 copies in Norway. In addition to his work as an essayist and novelist, Tore has played in several bands, and written for the screen and the theatre. His work has been translated into 11 languages.

Yiannis Ritsos

Yiannis Ritsos

Books

Epitaphios

Yiannis Ritsos (1909-1990) wrote more than a hundred books of poems, plays, fiction, essays and translations. His work has been translated into over forty different languages. He won the Lenin Peace Prize and was nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Picasso drew his picture. Mikis Theodorakis set many of his poems to music. Louis Aragon called him, ‘The greatest poet of our age.’ After the Civil War Ritsos was imprisoned for four years on the concentration-camp islands of Lemnos and Makronisos. His books were banned in Greece until 1954. In the 1960s, he was imprisoned on Samos for three years by the military junta.

Arguably Ritsos’ most famous single work, Epitaphios consists of 28 stanzas of 8 rhyming couplets and is based on the Greek Orthodox Epitaphois Thrinos. Ritsos wrote the poem after seeing a newspaper photograph of a woman mourning for her son, a striking tobacco-worker murdered by the police. Shortly after it was published, the Metaxas dictatorship burned copies of the poem at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens in 1936. It was later set to music by Theodorakis, and recorded by Nana Mouschouri.

Manuel Rivas

Manuel Rivas

Books

All is Silence

The Low Voices

Manuel Rivas was born in Coruña in 1957. He writes in the Galician language of north-west Spain. He is well known in Spain for his journalism, as well as for his prize-winning short stories and novels, which include the internationally acclaimed The Carpenter’s Pencil and Books Burn Badly. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Wiliam Owen Roberts

Wiliam Owen Roberts

Books

Paris

Wiliam Owen Roberts was born in 1960 in Bangor, North Wales. He attended the University of Wales from 1978-1981, graduating in Welsh literature and theatre studies. He then took an MA course on television plays, focussing primarily on the work of Dennis Potter. In 1983-4 he  was  writer-in-residence with Cwmni Cyfri Tri Theatre Company, then worked for five years as a Script Editor at HTV. He became a full-time writer in 1989.

He is best known for his novels, but also writes for theatre, radio and television. His first novel, Bingo! (1985), is a re-working of the diaries of Franz Kafka. His second novel, Y Pla (1987) is set in Wales, the Near-East and Europe in the 14th century, and was translated into English by Elisabeth Roberts as Pestilence in 1991.    Paradwys  (2001) is set  during the American war of independence and the French revolution and deals with the abolition of slavery. Paris Arall, was published in 2007, and is about the experience of White Russians in exile, following the 1917 revolution.

Wiliam Owen Roberts lives in Cardiff with his wife and three daughters. His latest novel is Petrograd (2008), winner of the 2009 Wales Book of the Year Award (Welsh-language) and the ITV Wales People’s Choice Award.

Nemonie Craven Roderick

Nemonie Craven Roderick

Books

Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus

Nemonie Craven Roderick is a literary agent. She has contributed to Sight & Sound, Roads & Kingdoms and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, amongst other publications.

Olivier Rolin

Olivier Rolin

Books

Stalin's Meteorologist

Olivier Rolin was born in Paris, and is a critically acclaimed author and freelance writer. His books have won many prizes, including the Prix du Style for Stalin’s Meteorologist in 2014.He first visited Russia, then the USSR, in 1986. Since then, he has returned many times and has travelled widely throughout the country.

Olivia Rosenthal

Olivia Rosenthal

Books

To Leave with the Reindeer

Evelio Rosero

Evelio Rosero

Books

The Armies

Feast of the Innocents

Evelio Rosero studied Social Communication in the Externado University of Colombia. In 2006 he was awarded the Tusquets National Prize for Literature in Colombia for his novel Los Ejércitos.

Dina Salustio

Dina Salustio

Books

The Madwoman of Serrano

Lydie Salvayre

Lydie Salvayre

Books

Cry, Mother Spain

Lydie Salvayre grew up near Toulouse after her exiled Republican parents fled Franco’s regime. As a child she spoke Spanish, only learning French when she started school. She studied medicine and specialised as a psychiatrist in Marseille, before beginning to write at the end of the 1970s. Her novel La Compagnie des spectres won the Prix Novembre in 1997 and was named Book of the Year by Lire. Pas Pleurer (translated here as Cry, Mother Spain) won the Prix Goncourt in 2014.

Cristina Sánchez-Andrade

Cristina Sánchez-Andrade

Books

The Winterlings

Cristina Sánchez-Andrade has degrees in law and mass media, and writes for various Spanish newspapers and literary magazines as a critic and book reviewer. Her third novel, Your King No Longer Walks this Earth, won the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz literary prize at the 2005 Guadalajara International Book Fair in Mexico, and has been translated into English and Portuguese. The Winterlings, her latest novel, has gained outstanding critical acclaim, and was a Herralde Novel Prize finalist in 2013.

Iván Sándor

Iván Sándor

Books

Legacy

Iván Sándor (born 1930) is one of Hungary’s best-known living writers. Since 1967 he has published sixteen novels and many other volumes of prose, earning critical acclaim in several countries. Several titles have been translated into German and French Drága Liv (Geliebte Liv), Követés (Spurensuche / Filature), Az éjszaka mélyén 1914 (Husar in der Hölle 1914 / Au fonds de la nuit, 1914). Követés (Legacy) is his first book to be translated into English.

Sándor has been awarded Hungary’s highest literary honours, including the Sándor Márai Prize (2000) and the Kossuth Prize (2005). Earlier in his career he was a prominent theatre critic and playwright. He lives in Budapest.

Boualem Sansal

Boualem Sansal

Books

Harraga

Boualem Sansal is the author of six novels. His first novel Le Serment des Barbares (The Barbarians’ Oath) won the 1999 Prix du Premier Roman. In 2003 he was dismissed from his government job for criticising the Algerian government, and since 2006 his books have been banned in his own country. Today he is considered not only one of Algeria’s most important writers, but also a literary figure of international stature. Le village de l’allemand (also translated into English by Frank Wynne as An Unfinished Business) won France’s Grand Prix RTL LIRE 2008 and Belgium’s Grand Prix de la Francophonie 2008. In 2011 he was awarded the German Booksellers’ Peace Prize and in 2012 the Prix du Roman Arabe, later withdrawn, despite protests from the jury, following a visit to Israel to speak at the Jerusalem Writers Festival. He lives in Boumerdès, near Algiers.

Roberto Saviano

Roberto Saviano

Books

Beauty and the Inferno

Roberto Saviano was born in 1979 in Casal di Principe, a Mafia stronghold in Naples. He grew up in a middle-class household – his father Luigi was a doctor, and his mother Miriam a teacher. Saviano’s first experience of the Mafia came during his youth, when his father rushed a young Camorra (Neapolitan Mafia) victim to hospital, against Mafia protocol (victims are supposed to be left to die). Luigi was later severely beaten in retribution.

Years on, Saviano himself enraged the Mafia with the publication of his carefully researched Gomorrah (2006), an expose of Camorra. The Camorra immediately issued him with a death sentence. He was given a round-the-clock police guard and was forced to move constantly. Despite the huge success of the novel – Gomorrah has sold millions of copies, won a number of high-profile literary awards, and spawned a widely-acclaimed film adaptation in 2008 – Saviano is forced to live in exile, unable to make public appearances in Italy and faced with continued death threats.

Atef Abu Seif

Atef Abu Seif

Books

The Book of Gaza

Atef Abu Seif was born in Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in 1973. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Birzeit and a masters’ degree from Bradford. Recently, he received his Ph.D. in political and social sciences from the European University Institute in Florence. He is the author of four novels: Shadows in the Memory (1997), The Tale of the Harvest Night (1999), Snowball (2000) and The Salty Grape of Paradise (2003 & 2006). He also published a collection of short stories entitled Everything is Normal. Abu Seif is also the author of Civil Society and the State: Theoretical Perspective with Particular Reference to Palestine, published in Amman in 2005. He is a regular contributor to several Palestinian and Arabic newspapers and journals.

Lutz Seiler

Lutz Seiler

Books

Kruso

Lutz Seiler was born in 1963 in Gera, Thuringia, and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin and Stockholm. Since 1997, he has been the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Museum. His many prizes include the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Bremen Prize for Literature, the Fontane Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize 2014, and the German Book Prize 2014.

Anna Selby

Anna Selby

Books

The World Record

Anna Selby was born in Shropshire in 1982 to a Canadian artist and a British minimalist. She was one of four writers selected from the UK to travel to Bangladesh with the British Council as part of a writing exchange project with young Bangladeshi writers. In 2011, she was shortlisted for an Eric Gregory Award. Her poetry has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including Smiths Knoll, Magma, The Rialto and the Cinnamon Anthology of Young British Poets. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing Masters at the University of East Anglia. A specialist in contemporary international poetry, she works as Literature and Spoken Word Co-ordinator at the Southbank Centre and is an associate artist of dance-film company, State of Flux.

Abnousse Shalmani

Abnousse Shalmani

Books

Khomeini, Sade and Me

Abnousse Shalmani was born in Tehran in 1977. Her family went into exile in Paris in 1985 where she studied history and became a journalist and short-film maker. With the memoir Khomeini, Sade and Me, her first book, she returned to her first great love: literature. Khomeini, Sade and Me was originally published in French and has also been translated into Italian and Dutch.

Mukhamet Shayakhmetov

Mukhamet Shayakhmetov

Books

The Silent Steppe

Mukhamet Shayakhmetov was born into a small nomadic community on the Kazakh steppes in 1922. He grew up as a child rearing horses and livestock, wandering across large tracts of land with the family group as his people had done since time immemorial. When the Soviet policy of collectivization was introduced in 1929, all of his senior relatives were called off to work in factories. In due course, he himself was transported to a camp. He was conscripted to fight for the Red Army in Stalingrad, and returned after the war at the age of 21. He trained as a teacher, went on to took part in the Second World War. Since then he has taught in schools in Kazakhstan, and played an active role in national education policy.

Adania Shibli

Adania Shibli

Books

Minor Detail

Adania Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974. Her first two novels appeared in English with Clockroot Books as Touch (tr. Paula Haydar, 2010) and We Are All Equally Far From Love (tr. Paul Starkey, 2012). She was awarded the Young Writer’s Award by the A. M. Qattan Foundation in 2002 and 2004.

Samuel Shimon

Samuel Shimon

Books

Beirut 39

Samuel Shimon was born into an Assyrian family in Al-Habbaniyah, Iraq, in 1956. He left his country in 1979, with the dream of becoming a Hollywood director, and has since lived in Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Aden, Cairo, Tunis and Paris. In Paris, he settled for the next decade as a refugee, and started the small press Gilgamesh Editions. In 1996, Shimon moved to London where he lives today. He is the co-founder and assistant editor of Banipal magazine, and creator of kikah.com, an online journal of Arab culture. His first novel, the autobiographical An Iraqi in Paris, was published in 2005, long-listed for the 2007 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and nominated for the long list of the 2006 Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Literary Reportage.

Abdulai Silá

Abdulai Silá

Books

The Ultimate Tragedy

Abdulai Silá was born in 1958 in Catió, Guinea Bissau. He moved to the capital, Bissau, to complete his school studies and then to Dresden, Germany, to complete a degree in Power Engineering. He currently lives in Bissau and combines telecommunications work with writing. He is the author of four novels, A Última Tragédia, Eterna Paixão [Eternal Passion], Mistida [Mixed] and Memórias (Mantic Memories], all of which deal with Bissau-Guinean culture and history. He is the co-founder of the publisher Ku Si Mon Editora and he has also written a play, As Orações de Mansat [Mansat’s Prayers], a Bissau-Guinean Macbeth.

Marie Jalowicz Simon

Marie Jalowicz Simon

Books

Gone To Ground

Marie Jalowicz Simon was born in 1922 and came from a middle-class Jewish family. She escaped the ghettos and concentration camps that claimed the lives of so many other Jews during the Second World War, by living in hiding in Berlin. After the war she taught classics and philosophy at the Berlin Humboldt University, but rarely spoke about her past. Shortly before her death in 1998, her son recorded her telling her story for the first time. This book is based on the tapes he recorded.

Johanna Sinisalo

Johanna Sinisalo

Books

The Blood of Angels

Johanna Sinisalo was born in 1958. Not Before Sundown (2000), her acclaimed first novel, won the prestigious Finlandia Award and the James Tiptree Jr Award for works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore our understanding of gender. Also known in Finland for her television and comic-strip writing, she has won the Atorox Prize for best Finnish science fiction or fantasy story seven times and has been the winner of the Kemi National Comic Strip Contest twice. In addition to novels she has written reviews, articles, comic strips, film and television scripts and edited anthologies, including The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy. Her short story ‘Baby Doll’ was a Nebula nominee and Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire nominee in France, and it was published in the Year’s Best SF 13 anthology in the USA. Her work has been translated into over twenty languages, with three titles currently available in English: Not Before Sundown/Troll: A Love Story (Peter Owen/Grove Atlantic), Birdbrain and Blood of Angels (Peter Owen).

Nihad Sirees

Nihad Sirees

Books

The Silence and the Roar

States of Passion

Nihad Sirees is a civil engineer who was born in Aleppo. His novels include   Cancer, The North Winds, A Case of Passion,   and The Silence and the Roar.   Of his many television dramas the most widely acclaimed,   Silk Market,   set in Aleppo during the political turmoil of the 1950s, was shown throughout the Middle East, in Germany and in Australia. His latest series,   Al Khait Al Abiadh   (The First Gleam of Dawn), provides a frank depiction of the country’s government-controlled media.   After increasing surveillance and pressure from the Syrian government, Nihad Sirees left Syria in 2012. He was at   Brown University in the US on an International Writers Fellowship from 2012 – 2013.

Tania Skarynkina

Tania Skarynkina

Books

A Large Czeslaw Milosz With a Dash of Elvis Presley

Tania Skarynkina, poet and essayist, was born in 1969 in Smarhon, Belarus. She has worked as a journalist and illustrator. Her first poem was published in 1980. Her later poetry has appeared in a wide range of journals and in book form. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the prestigious Jerzy Geidroyc Literary Award, and in 2017 she was shortlisted for the Grigor’ev Prize for Russian language poetry.

Peter Stamm

Peter Stamm

Books

All Days Are Night

Peter Stamm was born in 1963, in Scherzingen, Switzerland. He is the author of the novels Agnes, On A Day Like This, Unformed Landscape, Seven Years (Granta) and the collection We’re Flying (Granta), as well as numerous short stories and radio plays. He lives in Winterthur.

Saša Stanišić

Saša Stanišić

Books

How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Saša Stanišić was born 1978 in Višegard in Bosnia-Herzegovina and lives in Germany since 1992. He has published short stories, audio plays and essays, and is engaged in literary performances and theatre. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is his first novel and was shortlisted for the German Book Award as well as winning several other major prizes with translations into 24 languages forthcoming. Stanišić is also the recipient of the prestigious Graz and Iowa writing fellowships.

Hamid Sulaiman

Hamid Sulaiman

Books

Freedom Hospital: A Syrian Story

Hamid Sulaiman is a Syrian artist born in 1986. He studied architecture and fine arts in Damascus. In 2011 he got arrested and tortured by the Assad regime, shortly afterwards he fled the country, first to Germany, then to Paris.

Hamid Sulaiman has been working on a comic about the life of people in the Syrian civil war since he left Damascus and fled to Europe. In it he addresses the events in his homeland, the experiences of his friends and personal, autobiographical moments. In this way, he creates a striking picture of the political situation and of everyday life in Syria. Using the mediums of drawing and comics he compresses five years of civil war – the violence, the turmoil, the disasters and the everlasting principle of hope.

On 280 sheets with about 1120 individual drawings, he depicts the everyday life of the Syrian youth in the Civil War, perpetually threatened by the Assad-regime and the IS, coping with the daily violence and searching for normality in utterly abnormal surroundings. His stories are based on his own experiences as well as on You-Tube-footage, personal impressions as well as political propaganda images, individual fates as well as iconographic news feed photos.

Ever since he has been part of several group exhibitions in Germany and France, where he attracted attention especially with his evocative, expressive ink drawings. For the last three years Hamid Sulaiman has been working on a comic, which reflects the life in Syria.

Witold Szabłowski

Witold Szabłowski

Books

The Assassin from Apricot City

Witold Szabłowski is an award-winning Polish journalist and writer, specialising in Turkish affairs. In 2008, he was the recipient of the Melchior Wańkowicz Award (category: Inspiration of the Year). His report on Turkish honour killings, ‘It’s Out of Love, Sister’, received an honorary mention at the Amnesty International competition for the best articles on human rights issues. In 2010, Szabłowski received the European Parliament Journalism Award for his reportage ‘Two Bodies Will Wash Ashore Today’, on the problem of illegal immigrants flocking to the European Union.

In 2011, The Assassin from Apricot City won the Beata Pawlak Award and was nominated for the NIKE Award, Poland’s most prestigious book award. The book was selected for English PEN’s PEN Translates! Programme. The Assassin from Apricot City is Witold’s first book to be translated into English.

Ece Temelkuran

Ece Temelkuran

Books

Women Who Blow on Knots

Ece Temelkuran is one of the Turkey’s best known novelists and political commentators. She has lived in several countries such as Lebanon and Tunisia to write her novels. Her investigative journalism books broach subjects that are highly controversial in Turkey, such as the Kurdish and Armenian issues and freedom of expression. She was a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford Saint Anthony’s College, and has given the “Freedom Lecture” as a guest of Amnesty International and Prince Claus Foundation.

Ko Ko Thett

Ko Ko Thett

Books

To Leave with the Reindeer

The Book of Cairo

The Madwoman of Serrano

Sergius Seeks Bacchus

Zuleikha

The Remainder

Bones Will Crow

ko ko thett grew up in Burma. By the early 1990s, he was thoroughly poeticized and politicized at Rangoon Institute of Technology. In 1996 he published and clandestinely distributed two uncensored chapbooks on the campus. He left the country in 1997 following a brief detention for his role in the December 1996 student uprising in Rangoon. ko ko thett has written extensively for several Burma journals and leading papers in Finland.

Ngũgi wa Thiong’o

Ngũgi wa Thiong’o

Books

Dreams in a Time of War

Ngũgi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 in Kenya. He was educated at Makerere University College in Uganda. In 1964 he wrote his first novel Weep Not, Child.

In 1977 his play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) led to his arrest and imprisonment under Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenyan government. He spent a year in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison without charge. While behind bars he wrote the novel Devil on the Cross, and later captured his time in prison in Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary.

Ngũgi was released in 1978, but he and his family were continuously harassed by the Kenyan regime. Ngũgi left Kenya and went into exile in 1982. He continued to write and in 1986 his novel Matigari was banned in Kenya. In 1992 he became Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University and in 2004 he returned to Kenya for two years, until an armed robbery at his home once again forced him into exile for fear of his family’s safety.

Ngũgi is now Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

Wojciech Tochman

Wojciech Tochman

Books

Like Eating a Stone

Born in 1969 in Krakow, Wojciech Tochman is an award-winning reporter and writer. With Like Eating A Stone, Tochman became a finalist for the Nike Polish Literary Prize and for the Prix Témoin du Monde, awarded by Radio France International. He set up an organization looking for missing people in Poland. He is also an author of two previous books: One Doesn’t Burn the Stones and Daughter, both published by Znak.

Jachym Topol

Jachym Topol

Books

The Devil's Workshop

Nightwork

Jachym Topol is the leading Czech author of his generation. Famous in his youth as an underground poet and songwriter, since the Velvet Revolution he has written the books that have most successfully and imaginatively captured the dislocation brought about by the fall of communism. His novels include Gargling with Tar, which was published by Portobello in 2011, The Devil’s Workshop (2013) and Nightwork (2014).

Hasan Ali Toptaş

Hasan Ali Toptaş

Books

Reckless

Hasan Ali Toptaş is one of Turkey’s top writers. His short story collections include The Identity of a Laugh, The Whispers of the Nobodies and Solitudes. His novels have won the Cankaya Literature Prize, the Culture Ministry Prize, the Yunus Nadi Novel Prize, the Cevdet Kudret Literature Prize, the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize and the Turkish Writers’ Union Great Novel Prize. He now lives in Ankara. He has been translated into German, French and Finnish. Solitudes has been made into a play and Shadowless was made into a film in 1998.

Dubravka Ugrĕsic

Dubravka Ugrĕsic

Books

The Ministry of Pain

Dubravka Ugrĕsic was born in Yugoslavia in 1949. She has held a number of positions at American and European universities, including the University of Zagreb, Wesleyan University (USA) and the Slavic Seminarium at the University of Amsterdam. Her previous publications include Thank You for Not Reading (2003), The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998), and The Culture of Lies (1998). She writes regularly for NRC Handelsblad and Vrij Nederland in Holland and Die Zeit and Lettre International in Germany.

Steven Uhly

Steven Uhly

Books

Kingdom of Twilight

Steven Uhly was born in 1964 in Cologne and is of German-Bengali descent, and partially rooted in Spanish culture. He has studied literature, served as the head of an institute in Brazil, and translated poetry and prose from Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

His book Adams Fuge was granted the “Tukan Preis” of the city of Munich in 2011. His novel Glückskind (2012) was filmed as a primetime production by director Michael Verhoeven for ARTE and the 1st German Channel ARD. He lives in Munich with his family.

Various

Various

Books

The Book of Cairo

Elena Varvello

Elena Varvello

Books

Can you hear me?

Elena Varvello was born in Turin, Italy, in 1971. She has published two collections of poetry, Perseveranza e salutare and Atlanti, a collection of short stories, L’economia delle cose (nominated for the Premio Strega, the Italian equivalent of the Man Booker Prize), and a novel, La luce perfetta del giorno. She teaches creative writing at the Scuola Holden in Turin. Can you hear me? is her first novel to be published in English.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Books

The Sound of Things Falling

The Shape of the Ruins

The All Saints' Day Lovers

Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1973. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne between 1996 and 1998, and has translated works by E. M. Forster and Victor Hugo, amongst others, into Spanish. He was nominated as one of the Bogotá 39, South America’s most promising writers of the new generation. His previous books include The Informers, which was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and The Secret History of Costaguana, which won the Qwerty prize in Barcelona. His books have been published in fifteen languages worldwide. After sixteen years in France, Belgium and Spain, he now lives in Bogotá.

Giorgio Vasta

Giorgio Vasta

Books

Time on My Hands

Giorgio Vasta was born in Palermo, Sicily in 1970 and now lives and works in Turin. A former editor at the publishing house Einaudi, his stories have been published in various anthologies. Time on My Hands is his first novel.

Peter Verhelst

Peter Verhelst

Books

The Man I Became

Peter Verhelst, born in 1962, is a Belgian Flemish novelist, poet and playwright. He has written more than 20 books. His work has been praised for its powerful images, the sensuality and richness of its language and the author’s unbridled imagination. His breakthrough came in 1999 with the novel Tonguecat, which won the Golden Owl Literature Prize and the Flemish State Prize for Literature. The Man I Became is his eleventh novel.

José Luandino Vieira

José Luandino Vieira

Books

Our Musseque

José Luandino Vieira was born in Portugal in 1935 and grew up in Luanda. He was one of a group of political activists whose trial in 1959 helped spark the Angolan uprising against colonial rule. He spent most of the following fifteen years in prison or under house arrest, until the collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974. His first collection of short stories, Luuanda, written in prison, was awarded the Fiction Prize by the Portuguese Writers’ Society in 1965, resulting in the society’s closure by the Salazar regime. Following Angolan independence, he held a number of important literary and cultural roles under the new Angolan government, including secretary-general of the Angolan Writers’ Union. He has published two novels (Nós, os do Makulusu (1974) and Nosso Musseque (2003)), two novellas and seven collections of short stories, along with two parts of his De Rios Velhos e Guerrilheiros trilogy. In 2006 he was awarded, but declined for personal reasons, the Camões Prize, the most prestigious international award for literature in the Portuguese language. He now lives in Portugal.

Juan Pablo Villalobos

Juan Pablo Villalobos

Books

Quesadillas

I'll Sell You A Dog

Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He studied marketing and Spanish literature. He has done a great deal of market research and published travel stories and literary and film criticism. He has researched such diverse topics as the influence of the avant-garde on the work of César Aira and the flexibility of pipelines for electrical installations. He now lives in Brazil and has two Mexican-Brazilian-Italian-Catalan children.

Cédric Villani

Cédric Villani

Books

Birth of a Theorem

Cédric Villani is a French mathematician who has received many international awards for his work including the Jacques Herbrand Prize, the Prize of the European Mathematical Society, the Fermat Prize and the Henri Poincaré Prize.

In 2010 he was awarded the Fields Medal, the International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, for his work on Landau damping and the Boltzmann equation. Often called ‘the mathematicians’ Nobel Prize’, it is awarded every four years and is viewed by some as the highest honour a mathematician can achieve.

He is a professor at Lyon University and Director of the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, working primarily on partial differential equations and mathematical physics.

Cao Wenxuan

Cao Wenxuan

Books

Bronze and Sunflower

Cao Wenxuan is one of China’s most important children’s writers and is widely considered the country’s most subtle and philosophical, often referred to as China’s very own Hans Christian Andersen. Many of his books have been bestsellers, including Thatched Cottage and Red Gourd, and he has been translated into French, Russian, Japanese, Korean and English. Cao has won several of China’s most prestigious awards for children’s literature, including the Song Qingling and Bing Xin prizes.

Tommy Wieringa

Tommy Wieringa

Books

These Are The Names

Tommy Wieringa was born in 1967 and grew up partly in the Netherlands and partly in the tropics. He began his writing career with travel stories and journalism, and is the author of many novels, several of which have won or been shortlisted for Dutch literary awards: Alles over Tristan (2002) won the Halewijn prize; Joe Speedboat (2005) won the F. Bordewijk prize and was nominated for the AKO prize, and in translation was shortlisted for the Oxford Weidenfeld prize in 2008; and Little Caesar (2009) was also nominated for the AKO prize, and in translation was nominated for the IMPAC prize in 2013. These Are The Names won Holland’s Libris prize in 2013.

Roger Willemsen

Roger Willemsen

Books

An Afghan Journey

Roger Willemsen is a German author, foreign correspondent, academic, critic and television personality with his own show ‘Willemsen’s Woche’ since 1991. Since then he has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and producer. He has written several books, including one based on interviews with former inmates of the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay.

Michal Witkowski

Michal Witkowski

Books

Lovetown

Michał Witkowski (born 1975) is well established as a novelist in Poland, known for his unabashed descriptions of the Polish gay underground, which broke barriers in a country still emerging from the repression of the communist past. His first novel Lubiewo remains his most successful, and has been published in many languages including English (as Lovetown, Portobello Books, 2010). Before The Lumberjack he published a set of short stories, and two other novels, Margot andBarbara Radziwiłłówna, though these have not appeared in English. The Lumberjack has been very well received in Poland and became a bestseller.

In December 2011 Witkowski came third in a list of Poland’s top ten best novelists under the age of 40 issued by the leading daily Gazeta Wyborcza. Witkowski has often appeared on Polish television, and is quite a controversial figure in Poland. He is also very popular, and has had great success with stage versions (monologues) of his novel Barbara Radziwiłłówna, as well as with his own audio recordings of his other novels. He lives in Warsaw.

Lina Wolff

Lina Wolff

Books

Bret Easton Ellis and the other dogs

Lina Wolff has lived and worked in Italy and Spain. During her years in Valencia and Madrid, she began to write her short story collection Många människor dör som du (‘Many People Die Like You’; Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2009). Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, her first novel, was awarded the prestigious Vi Magazine Literature Prize and shortlisted for the 2013 Swedish Radio Award for Best Novel of the Year. She now lives in southern Sweden. Her second novel, De polyglotta älskarna (‘The Polyglot Lovers’), is forthcoming from Albert Bonniers Förlag in 2016.

Xu Xiaobin

Xu Xiaobin

Books

Crystal Wedding

Xu Xiaobin is an influential and prolific Chinese female writer of fictions, proses and scripts. Born in Beijing in 1953 and learning painting from her childhood, Xu started to publish literary works since 1981. Her major works translated in English include Feathered Serpent, Dunhuang Dreams and Crystal Wedding. She has been awarded multiple prizes for her writings, including the first Lu Xun Literature Prize. She is also highly regarded as a painter and is skilled in the folk art of paper engraving.

Chen Xiwo

Chen Xiwo

Books

The Book of Sins

Chen Xiwo is one of contemporary China’s most respected writers and one of its most outspoken voices on freedom of expression for writers. His novels are characterized by defiance and black humour but because of his refusal to compromise on style or content, he was to go nearly 20 years before his works could find publication in his homeland. In 2007 Chen bravely sued the Chinese authorities for banning his novella collection The Book of Sins, which is now an English PEN award winner. Chen also won the Chinese Literature Media Prize, with his novel My Dissipation. Chen once worked as a ‘mamasan’ in a Tokyo brothel and he now teaches comparative literature at Fuzhou Normal University.

Guzel Yakhina

Guzel Yakhina

Books

Zuleikha

Samar Yazbek

Samar Yazbek

Books

A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution

Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist, born in Jableh in 1970. She is the author of several works of fiction. Her novel, Cinnamon was published in 2012. An outspoken critic of the Assad regime, but also of what she identifies as erroneous perceptions of ideological conformity within the Syrian Alawite community, Yazbek has been deeply involved in the Syrian uprising since it broke out on 15 March, 2011. Fearing for the life of her daughter she was forced to flee her country and now lives in hiding. She won the PEN/Pinter International Writer of Courage award in 2013.

A Yi

A Yi

Books

A Perfect Crime

A Yi is a Chinese author born in 1976. After spending five years as a police officer, he quit to become the editor-in-chief of the bi-monthly literary magazine Chutzpah. He has written two collections of short stories, Grey Stories and The Bird Saw Me, some of which have been published in Granta and the Guardian. He was nominated for the People’s Literature Short Stories prestigious award for Top Twenty Literary Giants of the Future in 2010. A Perfect Crime was published in China in 2011. He lives in Beijing.

Prabda Yoon

Prabda Yoon

Books

The Sad Part Was

Moving Parts

The author of multiple story collections, novels and screenplays, Prabda Yoon is also a translator (of classics by Salinger and Nabokov), independent publisher (of books both originally written in and translated into Thai), graphic designer, and filmmaker. Having lived in the USA from the ages of 14 to 26, he speaks fluent English and is at home moving between the cultures.

Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf

Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf

Books

The Sea-Migrations

Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf has lived in exile in the UK for 20 years. She is fast emerging as one of the most outstanding Somali poets, as well as a powerful woman poet in a literary tradition still largely dominated by men. The Sea-Migrations   (Somali title: Tahriib) is her first full-length book of poems, published by Bloodaxe Books with The Poetry Translation Centre.

Alejandro Zambra

Alejandro Zambra

Books

Ways of Going Home

Alejandro Zambra is a Chilean writer and the author of the poetry collections Bahia inútil (1998) and Mudanza (2003), the novels Bonsái (2006), La vida privada de los árboles (2007) – published in English as The Private Lives of Trees – and the book of essays No leer (2010). His novels have been translated into various languages. In Chile, Bonsai won the Critics Prize and the National Council Prize for Books for the best novel of the year in 2006. He is currently working on a book of short stories called Berta Bovary. He lives in Santiago and is a literature professor at the University of Diego Portales.

Alia Trabucco Zerán

Alia Trabucco Zerán

Books

The Remainder

Mei Zhi

Mei Zhi

Books

F: Hu Feng's Prison Years

Mei Zhi (1914–2004), originally known as Tu Qihua, was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu. She joined the Left-Wing Writers’ Union in 1932. In 1944, she joined the All-China Anti-Japanese Association of Literary and Art Circles. She helped Hu Feng edit the literary periodicals July and Hope. In the 1930s she began writing essays, novels, children’s stories and poetry. She published several books of poems for children. In 1955, she was forced to stop her creative work after the attack on Hu Feng. In 1980, after Hu Feng’s rehabilitation, she was appointed as a writer in residence of the Chinese Writers’ Association. As well as resuming her writing for children, she published a large number of memoirs and essays, including the present book and a full-length biography of Hu Feng.

Xu Zhiyuan

Xu Zhiyuan

Books

Paper Tiger: Inside the Real China

Xu Zhiyuan was born in Beijing in l976. He was a visiting scholar at Cambridge University from 2009 to 2010. He is editor-in-chief of the Chinese edition of Business Weekly and writes columns for the FT.

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This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT