was born in 1970 and is studying theatre production at the Latvian Academy of Culture in Riga. Her debut, a collection of short stories Akas m aja (The Well House), was published in 1999 to critical acclaim. In the same year, she received an award for her play Tumšie brieži (The Dark Deer), published in Latvia ’s literary monthly magazine Karogs and later staged at theatres in Riga and Valmiera, and at the Stuttgart State Theatre. Dzelzzale (Iron Weed, 2001) was staged in Latvia, Denmark and Finland. Her collection of poetry Nakts pragmatike (Night Pragmatist) appeared in 2000 and her novel Uguns nemodina (Fire Will Not Wake You) in 2001. Lately her new play Jasmins (The Jasmine) has been staged by the Independent Theatre Company “United Intimacy”.
is a Turkish Cypriot poet and academic writing in English. She is Head of the Department of Creative, Critical and Communication Studies at the University of Greenwich. Her first collection of poetry Venus Infers was published in 2004. Her poetry, fiction and academic writing engage with the mythic, post-colonial identities and the interstices of private and political memory. She also reviews fiction for The Times Literary Supplement and The Independent. Alev is a member of the PEN Writers in Prison Committee which campaigns for freedom of expression.
was born in Barcelona in 1962. She has a PhD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona where she now teaches at the Translation Faculty. She came to the foreground of Catalan poetry when she was awarded three of the most prestigious literary prizes for her books Trànsit entre dos vols (Transit between two flights, 2001), and Música i escorbut (Music and Scurvy 2002) and Petrolier, (Oil Tanker, 2003). She has also published the book of poems Coses Petites (Little things) with the prominent Catalan poet Francesc Parcerisas, and a book of essays El plaer de la lectura (The pleasure of reading, 2004). Her fourth poetry book is Jocs de l’oca (The Goose Games, 2006). Her work is included in several anthologies of Catalan poetry and she has been translated into Spanish, English, French, Italian, Sardinian, Macedonian, Finnish, Arabic and Slovenian. Since 2003 she is president of QUARKpoesia and in 2006 she started the poetry imprint Refractions (Refraccions) with the aim to publish bilingual or trilingual poetry books.
is an Iraqi poet and publisher, born in al-Samawa, Iraq, in 1956. He has lived in Cologne, Germany, since 1980, where he founded, in 1983, the publishing house, Al-Kamel Verlag, now well-known for its daring and distinctive quality of titles that numbered in that anniversary year almost 200. Seven collections of his own poetry have been published, some in German. He has also translated the poets al-Sayab, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus, Saadi Youssef, Unsi al-Hajj into German.
(1975) earned an MA cum laude for her thesis 'Irony in the Short Stories of Yusef Idris'. She has published three books of poetry and is currently working on her PhD dissertation on 'The narrator in the novels of Nagib Mahfouz'.
(b. 1960) is a poet, essayist, and translator. Following his graduation from Vilnius University with a major in mathematics, he worked for the Culture and Art Institute of Lithuania; in 1994–2002 – a director of international programmes in the Lithuanian Writers Union, a director of an international poetry festival Poetry Spring. Since 2003 he has been working as a chief editor of magazine Vilnius, published in English and Russian languages. Ališanka is a member of the Lithuanian Writers Union’s Board and Lithuanian PEN centre. He has published five books of poetry and two essay collections. In 1992, Equinox (1991) won the Zigmas Gėlė Award. The Return of Dionysus (2001) has received the Lithuanian Culture Ministry Award. Ališanka has translated poetry by Wisława Szymborska, Carolyn Forché, Dannie Abse, Bernardine Evaristo, Jerome Rothenberg, Desmond Egan, Jacek Podsiadło, and others. Ališanka has also received a Poetry Spring award for translation of poetry. His work has been translated into English, French, Polish, Swedish, Russian, Finnish, German and other languages. Ališanka lives and works in Vilnius.
was born in Lisbon in 1960. He is an anthropologist educated in Portugal and the USA, with work on gender and masculinity, as well as on "race" and ethnicity published in Portuguese and English. He currently teaches at the university in Lisbon and is active in the political party Left Block and in the gay and lesbian movement. Also known as a journalist and fiction writer, he contributed weekly editorials to Portugal 's foremost daily newspaper Público between 1990 and 1995. His short stories Quebrar em Caso de Emergência (Brake in Case of Emergency) were published in 1996, and his EuroNovela, a political dystopia about the future of the European Union and a satirical commentary on Portuguese nationalism, won the 1998 Caminho Prize for Sci-Fi.
was born in Edessa, northern Greece, in 1970. He was raised in Thessaloniki, where he now lives. He studied History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Masters and PhD in Art History) and worked as an art curator at the Thessaloniki Centre of Contemporary Art. He is currently a teacher of literature and a translator. He has published five poetry collections: Dormitory: Nine nocturnal parables (1999), House of ice (2001), Thirtythree(2003), Summer indoors + six proofs of capability (2005), 4-D: Four-Dimensional Poems(2006). He has also published two collections of short-stories: Don’t eat me (Kastaniotis, Athens 2005) and Charybdi’s Dog (Kastaniotis, 2008). His theatrical plays The washbasin (2007) and Blom! (2008) were staged in Thessaloniki. His poems and short-stories have been translated in five languages (English, French, Italian, Russian, Serbian and Persian), and have been included in anthologies, catalogues and literary journals in America, Canada, England, Sweden, Italy and Russia. He has performed in several poetry readings at international festivals such as the third Stockholm Poetry Festival and in the 53rd Venice Biennale.
born in 1964, in Fez, Morocco, has been living in Lyon since 1989, where he participates in the Association-Edition Poésie conferences. “Mohammed El Amraoui writes, speaks, and reads French. / Mohammed El Amraoui writes, speaks, and reads Arab. / Mohammed El Amraoui invents his own images, and syntactical and grammatical strategies. / Mohammed El Amraoui avoids conventional words; he has created ‘a fire at the tip of the tongue’ and discovered that the “sun is a bit weak’.” [B. Bretonnière] He has been the editor of the literary journal Les Cahiers de Poésie-rencontres since 2001, a journal that has also published poetry by Oliver Friggieri and Adrian Grima.
is a Spanish-born artist currently based in Rotterdam. By using elements of photography, video, documentary, installation and performance she focuses her artistic practice on the communities and issues surrounding memory, belonging, migration and geopolitics. Her work is site and context specific and it actively engages with the public. Her recent work includes an experimental film about the area of Kreuzberg in Berlin and its symbolical relation with migration.
was born 1950 in the village of Maghar in the Galilee. He is a bi-lingual poet, and the author of 6 poetry collections in Arabic, and 6 in Hebrew, as well as a novel and a short story collection. His poems have been translated into many languages. Arayde received his PhD in Hebrew literature from Bar-Ilan University and lectured at Haifa University. He is also a Hebrew-Arabic translator, a critic and a researcher into contemporary Arabic and Palestinian literature. Arayde has two television programs on the Israeli 2nd Channel and is director of the Nisan Mediterranean Poetry Festival in Maghar.
was born in Vitoria-Gasteiz in the Basque Country in 1958. He studied psychology and pedagogy in Salamanca and Basque Philology in Vitoria-Gasteiz. At present he teaches in secondary education. For his first book of poems, Hari Hauskorrak (Fragile threads, 1993), Arregi was awarded the Spanish Critics Prize. Some years later, in 1998, he was awarded the same prize for Kartografia (Cartography) which came out in Spanish in 2000. His work has also been included in Brazilian, English, German, Galician, Slovene and Spanish anthologies. Arregi has contributed to different newspapers and periodicals in the Basque Country, mainly to Egunkaria and Hegats where he is a regular columnist and critic. As translator, he has collaborated on the translation of Wyslawa Szymborska´s poems and in the translation of several Portuguese poets, such as Sophia de Melo, Eugénio de Andrade and Jorge de Sena.
is the pseudonym of José Irazu Garmendia. Born in 1951, he is a poet and novelist who writes both in Basque and in Spanish. Born in Asteasu (Guipuzcoa), he published his first collection of poems Ziutateak (The Towns) in 1976. This was followed two years later by Etopía for which he was awarded the Critics' Prize. Over the last twenty years he has published over twenty books for children and young people and has written radio plays and pieces for theatre. Atxaga's work is bound up with Basque music and he has penned a number of songs in Basque. He owes his literary renown primarily to his novels which have had great success nationally and been translated into several languages. The first of them Bi anai (Two Brothers) was awarded the Critics' Prize in 1985 as was Obabakoak (People of Obaba) in 1988 which, as well as winning the prize for Basque literature, was declared the best book in Spain that year. A figurehead of Basque writing today, Atxaga has recently published two novels in Spanish, El hombre solo (The Lone Man) and Esos Cielos (These Skies). His work occupies a place between the avant-garde and fantastic realism, and the characters and environment he writes of - the Basque people, their world and struggles - are to the forefront in his writings.
(1981) published his first novel A Long Cellar with a Low Ceiling Making You Crouch with Suad Al-Sabah Publishers in 2003. That same year, his short story collection Blue in a Sad Way was published by the Higher Council for Culture in Cairo. In 2007, his second novel Repeated Stopping was published by Dar Merit, followed by his third, The Italian's Bed, in 2008. He has won seven literary awards, including the Suad Al-Sabah Award for the Novel, and the Higher Council for Culture’s Award for the Short Story in 1999 and 2004. He also won the Higher Council for Culture Award for the Novel in 2004.
was born in Malta in 1977. She studied at the Faculty of Education at the University of Malta and read for a Masters degree in Literacy at the University of Sheffield. She has run writing workshops for both for adults and children. Her poetry and short stories have been collected in anthologies such as Illejla Ismagħni Ftit (2001), Gżejjer (Inizjamed, 2000), F’Kull Belt Hemm Kantuniera (Inizjamed, 2003), Ktieb għall-Ħruq (Inizjamed, 2004), and Storja Tinkiteb (Kunsill tal-lingwa, 2005). Translations of her short stories have been published in literary reviews, including In Focus (Pen Cyprus, 2005), West 47 and Cúirt 21 (Ireland, 2006), and have also been featured online on www.laurahird.com, a web page hosted by Scottish writer Laura Hird. More recently, she has published Others, Across (Inizjamed and Midsea Books, 2005), which contains two short stories translated into English, and Il-Linja l-Ħadra (‘The Green Line’), her first short story collection. In 2003 Clare was a member of the Maltese group representing Inizjamed at the Biennial of Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean held in Athens.
was born in Diyarbakır, but at a young age moved with her parents to Kumkapı, Istanbul. She studied at the Surp Mesropyan Armenian primary school and at the Çemberlitaş High School. Çelik, who worked as both a columnist and editor for Agos, the Turkish-Armenian Istanbul based paper, has also published stories and interviews in various journals. In 1999 she won honourable mention in the Yaşar Nabi Nayır Short Story Awards. Her short stories are collected in three books: Kum Saatinde Kumpkapı ( The Hour Glass of Kumkapı , 2000), Yılanın Yolu ( The Snake’s Trail, 2003) and Kaçak Yolcu ( Stowaway, 2005).
was born in Tallinn, Estonia in 1962 and studied biology at Tartu University. He started to publish poetry at the same time and his first poetry book came out in 1985, the second and the third during next five years. He then published his first novel The Border State, and continued to publish fiction and poetry including the collection Measure in 1997. During recent years he has written diary-like prose and diary-like poetry, even a diary in poems, The Spring and the Summer and (2009). He has also translated French authors such as Mauriac, Baudelaire and Proust into Estonian. His latest published translation is a book of poems by Fernando Pessoa (Alvaro de Campos). Having lived for a long time on the Estonian island of Hiiumaa, he is now staying in the centre of Estonia, always in the countryside.