was born in1983 in Sliven, Bulgaria. She graduated in Bulgarian Philology at the Faculty of Slavic Philologies, Sofia University with a MA degree in Literary Theory with a thesis Narrowed Publicity: Cryptographies in the Bulgarian Revival Correspondence (2006). She is a PhD student in Bulgarian Literature of the Revival Period at the same University. The topic of her dissertation is Literary Publicity and the Construction of Figures of Morality. Together with Kamelia Spassova she is working on the project: Doubles as Uncanny Figures in Literature. She is co-founder of the art-group Ustata (The Mouth). At the beginning of 2009, Maria became an editor of Literaturen vestnik ( Literary Newspaper). She has participated in poetry festivals abroad and had her poetry is translated into Croatian and German. She has published two books of poems Okoto ( The Eye), 2004 and Podnogieto na vecheriata ( Under the Knife of Supper), 2008.
from Latvia, is an art historian, writer, and politician. She was born in 1952 in Siberia where her family were deported by the Soviet regime. In 1957, Kalniete and her parents returned to Latvia. In 1988, Kalniete became involved in politics and since 1990, she has held several high-level positions, including charge d’affaires at the UN. She served as the Latvian ambassador to France and Spain between 1997 and 2002, and as Latvia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2002 to 2004. Since 2006 Sandra Kalniete has been a member of the Latvian Parliament. Her memoir With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows, 2001, highlights a little known chapter in the history of Eastern European post-war history—the deportation of half a million of Latvians to Soviet labour camps—captured the imagination of readers around the world and has been translated into twelve languages.
(1973) has published three collections of poetry: Kurat õrnal lumel (A Devil on Tender Snow, 2006), Tule mu koopasse, mateeria (Come into My Cave, Matter, 2007), and Heureka (Eureka, 2008); and a collection of short stories, Ahvid ja solidaarsus (Monkeys and Solidarity, 2010). Both her fiction and poetry are characterised by an ironical exploration of ideas, attitudes, and ethical stances. Heureka received the Estonian Cultural Endowment Award for poetry in 2009; both Heureka and Tule mu koopasse, mateeria won the Tallinn University Literary Prize (in 2008 and 2009, respectively). She has also published literary criticism, essays, and a children’s book Puuviljadraakon (Fruit Dragon, 2006), which received the Estonian Children’s Literature Centre’s Best Book of the Year Award. She has written five opera librettos, texts for cantatas and chamber songs. She has translated theory (Giorgio Agamben, Umberto Eco) and poetry by more than 100 poets (e.g. Jacopone da Todi, Giacomo Leopardi, Andrea Zanzotto, Valerio Magrelli, Philip Larkin, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ernst Jandl). In 2003 she won the first prize in the Società Dante Alighieri competition for translations of Italian poetry. Her poems have been translated into English, German, Hungarian and Italian.
(1941) is the most widely known and translated contemporary Estonian writer. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, philosophical essays and prose, with over thirty poetry collections in translation into many European languages. He translates poetry from French, English, Spanish, Chinese and Swedish and writes in Estonian, Finnish and English. His books in English are The Wandering Border (1987 and 1992), The Same Sea in us All (1990), I am the spring in Tartu (1991), Through the Forest (1996), and Evening Brings Everything Back, 2004. Jaan Kaplinski contributed to the Estonian cultural and political revival and was a member of the Parliament in the 1990s.
was born in North Wales and raised in the valleys of South Wales. He speaks five languages – Welsh, Breton, French, Spanish and English – and writes poetry in the strict Welsh meter called Cynghanedd as well rapping with hip-hop groups Y Dieygiad and Genod Droog. His poems have been released in various anthologies and he published a new joint collection of poetry with four other Welsh poets entitled Crap ar Farddoni in 2006. Aneirin is a presenter on the daily Welsh language television programme Wedi 7 and he established the first Welsh language programme on the internet called Siaradog.
Doris Kareva (1958) graduated from Tartu University in 1983 in Roman-Germanic philology, worked in the cultural weekly Sirp from 1978–1993 and 1997–2002. From 1992 to 2008 she was the Secretary-General of Estonian National Commission for UNESCO in Estonia and from 2009 was the Chief Editor of family journal Meie Pere. Kareva has published 12 collections of poetry, one book of children`s literature and one book of essays, received two national cultural prizes and numerous literary prizes. Books of her poetry have appeared in Russian, Latvian, Swedish, Thai, has also been translated into French, English, German, Dutch, Hindi, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Slovenic, Polish, Welsh, Scottish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Romanian, Irish, Greek and Hebrew. Her writing has been set to music, dance and theatre by various artists in Sweden, Belgium, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Greece, Thailand, Estonia. She has translated poetry, plays and essays (Ahmatova, Auden, Beckett, Brodsky, Dickinson, Gibran, Kabir, Shakespeare etc), compiled anthologies and written essays, articles and texts for classical music and theatre.
(1975) was born in Kokkola, Finland and now lives in Helsinki. She studied creative writing in Topelius Academy in 1994-1995, and has also studied folklore and aesthetics in Jyväskylä and Helsinki Universities. She has published three collections of poetry with Otava, most recently Harry Harlow’n rakkauselämät; her work has been translated into English, Russian, Estonian, German and Swedish, and has been widely anthologised. She has won several awards, including the 2004 Helsingin Sanomat prize for her first book.
(born 1971) is the art director of a Tallinn-based creative design studio and ad agency Rakett ('The Rocket'), he is an illustrator, designs books, board games and CD covers and runs a alternative micro publishing house Näo Kirik ('The Face Church') as well as writing poetry. He has participated in international poetry events and readings and won numerous awards for his design and art direction work. His poems have been translated into English, German, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Slovenian and Hungarian.
studied sociology at Istanbul University. She works as an editor for a prominent publishing house. Her poetry collections include Delilirikler (Crazylyrics, 1991), Cinayet Kisi + Iki Mektup (Winter of Murder + Two Letters, 1996), Ba (2005—winner of the 2005 Golden Orange Poetry Award), collected poems Kim Bagislayacak Beni (Who’s Going to Forgive Me, 2005) and Y’ol (2006).
(1963) lives in Warsaw. She graduated in Philosophy from Warsaw University and obtained her PhD from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruñ. Her first volume, Sacra conversazione (1992), was awarded the prestigious Koscielski Foundation Prize. Her second poetry collection, Materia prima (1999), was awarded the Polityka Magazine Passport for most promising literary talent and was shortlisted for the NIKE Literary Prize, the most prestigious of Polish awards, in 2000. She has received a number of other literary awards as well as fellowships from cultural foundations in Poland, Germany, Sweden and the USA and her poetry has been translated into eighteen languages and published in numerous magazines more than thirty anthologies. Salt Monody, as selection of poems translated by Elzbieta Wojczik-Leese was published by Zephyr Press in 2006.
was born in 1956 in Engelkirchen, Germany, lived in the UK through the 1990s and now lives in Hungary. She is considered one of the most distinguished translators from Polish into German and has just been awarded the prestigious Berlin Brucke award together with the author Olga Tokarczuk for her translation of the novel Taghaus, Nachthaus. Having translated nearly fifty books, her translations from Polish include prose by well-known authors such as Miron Bialoszewski, Hanna Krall, Aleksander Wat, Ida Fink, Olga Tokarczuk, Magdalena Tulli, and poetry by Ryszard Krynicki. Her own writings include Tiefebene, a memoir, and poetry in the anthology of poetry written in Britain in languages other than English, Mother Tongue.
(1962) has an M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Turku and studied Turkish studies at the Universities of Istanbul and Uppsala. She has worked as freelance translator from Turkish and Swedish since 1995. Among the authors she has translated are Orhan Pamuk, Hasan Ali Toptas and Klas Östergren. She has received several fellowships, for example the Finnish Government Artist's Grant for three years (2005-2007) and her translations of Orhan Pamuk's Snow and Istanbul won the Finnish Government Annual Award for Translation in 2005
was born in 1962 in Prague and graduated from the School of Electrical Engineering. He has worked in various jobs and since 1993 he has worked as technical translator from English. He published two poetry collections, Vál za mnou směšný šos (A Ridiculous tailcoat fluttered behind me, 1994) and Viděl jsi, že jsi (You saw that you were, 1998, in German as Du sahst, es gibt dich, 2001) and the novel Stopy za obzor (Footprints leading beyond the horizon, 2006). He lives in the village of Chrudichromy near Brno with his wife and two sons.
was born in Bucharest in 1983. His first poetry book, The Puppeteer (Vinea Publishing, 2003, 2007) won the most prestigious awards for literary debut (including the Mihai Eminescu National Award) and was considered to be one of the best poetry volumes of the “new wave”. His second book, Domestic Circus (Cartea Românească, 2005) was awarded The Romanian Academy Poetry Prize. He was editor of the literary magazine “versus/m” (2005-2007) and now he mainly works as translator of French literature (Tahar Ben Jelloun, René Daumal, Philippe Claudel), and also translates from Italian (Pier Paolo Pasolini) and Swedish (Malte Persson). He is co-author of the play Deformations. His poems have appeared in international anthologies and literary revues and have been translated into German, French, Slovenian, Serbian, Spanish, Polish, Czech and Korean.
was born in Šempeter pri Gorici, Slovenia, and now lives, works and writes between Nova Gorica, Ljubljana and Sarajevo. He studied at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts and the Peace Institute in Ljubljana and is currently a PhD student at Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts. Since 2005 he has worked as Research Assistant at the Peace Institute of Ljubljana. He is the author of the first monograph about the physical and social aspects of touching in Slovenian ( An attempt at a touch), and has published in journals for social sciences and humanities in Slovenian, English, Italian and Bosnian. He is the co‐founder and an active member of The Youth Club of the Slovenian Writers Association. He has published poems, novellas, plays and several literary reviews in the main literary journals in Slovenia and Bosnia ( Apokalipsa, OtočjeO, Sarajevske sveske). He is the editor of an anthology of young Slovenian writers, Zbornik Mladinskega kluba DSP. His publications include Mes(t)ne drame ( City Dramas, 2006), a collection of three plays. In 2008, he published Luciferjev padec ( Lucifer's Fall), a dramatic poem in ten acts. His literary‐philosophical travelogue, Sarajevski dnevnik ( Sarajevo Diary) came out in 2008.
was born in 1977 in Lublin, Poland. He studied culture animation and management and political science. His poetry debut was the collection Thanatos jeans in 2005. In 2008 published Traktaty konstrata (Konstrat’s treatises) and in 2009 Samochody i krew (Cars and blood). He has been awarded a number of poetry prizes in Poland. In 2004 participated in Polish-German Tranlation Workshop in Pieniezno (organized by Stowarzyszenie Żywych Poetow and Verein zur Förderung der Deutsch-Polnischen Literatur. His poetry was published in all of the most important Polish literature magazines including: Ha!art, Odra, Topos, Wakat, Red, Opcje. Thanatos jeans was selected as best debut poetry book of 2005 in the project Poets of the New Century.
was born in 1948 in Athens, studied natural sciences in his native city and in Stuttgart, and obtained his doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Wroclav. He is known as writer, literary critic and translator of sixty-two books from eight languages, as well as book reviewer for the two leading Athens dailies, Ta Nea and Eleutherotypia. He has published a collection of short stories, four novels, a book of texts accompanying famous photographs of the 20th century entitled It’s Over, and three books of literary essays. His latest novel, The Longing of Dragons (2000) to be published in German this year, is a philosophical thriller which explores contemporary Greek identity in relation to Europe through the story of an international chase after a stolen mummy. Demosthenes Kourtovik lives in Athens.
(1969) is a feminist writer and dramatist. She studied social work and is currently devoting her time to the question of homelessness. Some of her short stories have been published in the magazine Aspekt (1999, 2000) and in the collection entitled Poviedka (Short Story) 2001. Her debut was a short book of prose works Neverné ženy neznášajú vajíčka (Faithless Wives Do Not Lay Eggs, 2002), which was followed by a collection of prose works Travesty šou (Travesty Show, 2004) and she has also written two books for the theatre of the homeless: Krvavý kľúč (The Bloodstained Key, 2005) and Oktagon (Octagon, 2006). In 2008 her first novel Žena zo sekáča (A Secondhand Woman) was published.
was born in 1940 in Prague where she still lives when not travelling abroad. A former journalist, banned until 1989, she is the author of numerous articles based on her travels, short stories, novels and books for children. Her writings include Krížová cesta kocárového kocího (The Coachmen’s Calvary, 1977) Arboretum (1987) and Kocicí životy (Cat Lives, 1997). Her biography of Václav Havel was published in English in 1993, and English translations of her work appeared in anthologies Writing on the Wall, Description of a Struggle and Allskin and Other Tales by Contemporary Czech Women.
(1946) was born to Latvian parents in Sweden and today divides his time between the two contires, writing in both languages and translating between them. His first poetry collection Pazemes dzeja (Underground Poetry) was published in the form of poetry sheets and posters. Resented by the conservative Latvian exile circles, his anarchistic rebelling poetry against stagnation and social myths was enthusiastically embraced by the younger generation. His later collections Iesnas un citi dzejoļi (A Cold and Other Poems, 1971), Biszāles (1976), Tagadnes (Presents, 1990), and Mana latviskā ikdiena (My Everyday Latvian Life, 1994), were written in a more minor key, yet the author’s scepticism and irony is present here as well – both in a social sense and in his attitude toward traditional poetic forms and language. In 1994, he published Laiks (Time, 1994), together with the poet Uldis Bērziņš. His collection Vilks Vienacis (Wolf One-Eye, 1996), written after the poet partially lost his sight, was published bilingually in Sweden and in the United Kingdom.
(b. 1964) is an Estonian poet who has published ten books of poetry and three collections of essays that include literary criticism as well as writings concerning art and cinema. He has been teaching literary and cultural theory at the Estonian Institute of Humanities since 1990. In 2001 Krull founded a poetry translation review Ninniku (www.eki.ee/ninniku/) and in 2003 there followed a book series - Ninniku Raamatukogu. He has translated poetry from French (André Breton, René Char, Francis Ponge, Bernard Noël, Edmond Jabès, Mohammed Dib, Amina Said, Tahar Ben Jelloun), English (Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Rita Dove, Michael Ondaatje, Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Sujata Bhatt, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bernstein, John Berryman, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams), Dutch (Cees Nooteboom, Hans van de Waarsenburg, Arjen Duinker, Diana Ozon), German (Michael Augustin), Finnish (Caj Westerberg, Tomi Kontio, Jouni Tossavainen, Tapani Kinnunen, Saila Susiluoto), Swedish (Claes Andersson) and Spanish (Pablo Neruda). Krull has acquired several prizes for poetry and criticism from the Estonian literary reviews, the Annual Prize of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia for essays in 1998 and 2007, the Annual Prize of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia for poetry in 2002, the Baltic Assembly Prize for literature in 2005 and the Tallinn University Literary Prize in 2007. Anthological pieces from his poetry have been translated into Finnish, Swedish, Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish, Slovenian, Russian, Galician and Latvian.
(1970) is a poet, translator from Italian, and lecturer at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. She is known for her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy and sonnets by Petrarch and other Italian poets. Her only collection of poems Retardacija (Retardation 2001) has received critical acclaim and is considered the best poetry debut of the 1990s.
(1978) holds an M.A. in Turkish and Islamic studies and a Ph.D. in non-Western literatures from Charles University in Prague. He held long-term graduate scholarships at the universities in Berlin, Ankara, Istanbul and Princeton. He currently teaches Turkish and Turkish literature at Charles University and continues to pursue research into Turkish literature from the late-Ottoman and early Republican eras. His translation of Orhan Pamuk´s novel My Name is Red into Czech was awarded the prestigious 2008 Magnesia Litera award for the best literary translation of the year.