The World Bookshelf

Soleïman Adel Guémar

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Neil Astley

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Alaa Al Aswany

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Tomas Bannerhed

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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

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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

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Sherko Bekas

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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

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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

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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

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Hassan Blasim

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Söyüngül Chanisheff

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Diego Marani

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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

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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

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Diao Dou

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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

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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

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Dulce Maria Cardoso

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Carlos Gamerro

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Azita Ghahreman

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Alois Hotschnig

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Dunja Jogan

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Samir Kassir

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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

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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

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Walter Kempowski

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

Tatiana Salem Levy

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Lost Evenings, Lost Lives poets

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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

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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

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Guus Luijters

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Margaret Mazzantini

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Eugenio Montale

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Fiston Mwanza Mujila

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Matías Néspolo

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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

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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

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Zaher Omareen

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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

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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

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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.

Shahrnush Parsipur

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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

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Ihor Pavlyuk

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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

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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

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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

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

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

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Alek Popov

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Nicola Pugliese

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Evelio Rosero

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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

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Lydie Salvayre

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Witold Szabłowski

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Elena Varvello

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Samar Yazbek

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Mei Zhi

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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

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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.