born in 1966, is an Indian poet writing in Kannada language. She has four collections of poems of poems, four plays and a collection of essays on Gender, Language, Literature and Culture for her credit. She has conducted theatre and poetry workshops in India and abroad, culminating with readings and productions for women, children and people from marginalized communities. Her poems are translated into many Indian languages including English, apart from Vietnamese, Cebuano, Spanish and French and have seen publication in various journals and poetry anthologies in those respective languages. As a poet, Mamta has participated in Poetry Africa, Medellin, Cuba, Vietnam and Granada poetry festivals. With a specialization in Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Kannada Literature and Cultural Discourse, she teaches at the Centre for Kannada Studies, Jnana Bharathi, Bangalore University and lives in Bangalore, India.
is an editor, translator and co-founder of Metis Publications (founded 1982). She has commissioned and prepared for publication hundreds of books, both fiction and non-fiction, by local and international authors, acting as the commissioning editor and foreign rights manager of the company. She has been a member of the editorial board of translation journal Metis Çeviri and of Defter, a critical thought quarterly. She has contributed to the organization of many seminars, conferences and symposiums relevant to her editorial work. She is the editor of World Tribunal on Iraq: Making the Case Against War (Metis, Turkey, 2006 and Olive Branch Press, USA, 2008) and co-editor of Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said (forthcoming in Fall 2008 by Metis, Turkey, and in Summer 2008 by Verso, UK). She has chaired the Writers in Prison Committee of Turkish PEN for many years and has acted as a peace and freedom-of-expression activist for over twenty years. Sökmen is a member of the Turkish Publishers Association, Turkish PEN and Alliance of Independent Publishers for an Alternative Globalization. She is currently co-chairing the Organizing Committee Guest of Honour Turkey Frankfurt Book Fair 2008.
’s work addresses war and its manifestations in culture and ideas. She is interested in the meaning and consequences of war in history and now; how it affects our identity and sense of place; how we are shaped by it and how it is passed on through generations. Her mediums include drawing, sculpture, painting, text and video. The work is often ironic and irreverent or has a sense of uncertainty and dislocation. With this she hopes to open a space to the irrational, to other possibilities and new interpretations. All her work has a socio-political focus. It draws inspiration from DaDa and Surrealism as well as writers such as, Benjamin, Levinas, Deleuze. She has spent time with the British Territorial Army where she made casts of their arsenal in soap and entered into a transatlantic visual dialogue with a Canadian artist about war and peace involving both digital and object based exchanges. She also digitally manipulates maps, displacing certain areas and replacing them with images to explore nationhood, territory and identity. She is currently working on a body of work about contemporary war and modernism for a solo show at Leeds Met Gallery, England. Her work has been shown in the UK, Canada and Germany and is a part of a number of private collections. As a part of her practice she also programmes a small contemporary art gallery called twenty+3 projects in the front room of her house in Manchester. It has a mandate to show international and regional, non-commercial, work.
was born in New York City in 1971 and has lived in Madrid, Spain since 1999. Writing in both Spanish and English, he is a prolific author and anthologist who has published over eighty books in many different genres. He has edited two anthologies of gay poetry: one in Catalan, Ells s'estimen. Poemes d'amor entre homes (1999), and one in English, Best Gay Poetry 2008, the first of an annual series. He has published translations into English of the gay Spanish poets: Luis Antonio de Villena, Luis Martínez de Merlo, Jesus Encinar, and Luis Cremades, among others.
, born in Oslo in 1958, is a Swedish writer, journalist, literary critic and expert on central Europe. He writes for the culture section of the leading Stockholm-based broadsheet Svenska Dagbladet, where he was the Deputy Cultural Editor in 1995-98. The first of his four novels, De ansiktslösa (Faceless Men, 1987) brought him to the forefront of his generation. Theres (1996), a documentary novel about the German left-wing terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, received the prestigious Aftonbladet Literary Prize and was translated into several languages. Allt förgängligt är bara en bild (Only the Image Remains, 1999) is a novel set in the besieged Munich of 1919, with the contrasting main characters Rainer Maria Rilke and the dramatist-revolutionary Ernest Toller caught in the city during the brief workers’ council republic. He is also the author of essays I en annan del av staden (In a Different Part of Town, 1990) and Den kluvna spegeln (The Divided Mirror, 1991), essays and reports from Eastern Europe. Prague (No Exit, 2002) is a collection of essays about Prague’s literary heritage. Steve Sem-Sandberg divides his time between Stockholm and Prague.
(1943) is a poet and translator of Azerbaijani, Finnish, Russian and Turkish literature. She has published three collections of her own poetry and several books for children, as well as a number of translations, including poems by Nazim Hikmet, Fazil Husnu Daglarca, Yunus Emre, and prose by Aziz Nesin, Yasar Kemal and Orhan Pamuk. She has also edited and translated a selection of modern Turkish poetry with her husband, the poet Andres Ehin.
was born in Saidí, Baix Cinca, Catalonia in 1972. He teaches History of Ancient and Mediaeval Art at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. With degrees in Fine Art and in Social Anthropology and Culture from the Universitat de Barcelona, he combines his teaching with writing. He has published Els ventres de la terra [The Bellies of the Earth] (Columna, 2000), L'arbre sense tronc [The Tree With No Trunk] (Columna, 2001), Una llengua de plom [A Tongue of Lead] (Quaderns Crema, 2002) and La força de la gravetat [The Force of Gravity] (Quaderns Crema, 2006).
writes poetry, short stories and theatre plays, and teaches English at Istanbul’s Bogazici University. Her stories have been published in Turkish literary monthly Kitap-lik since 2004. and her short play The Little Green Country was staged by Theatre Dot in Istanbul in May 2007. She has translated poetry, prose and film subtitles from English and French, and is currently working on the translation of Aamer Hussein’s stories.
was born in 1956 in Iraq into an Assyrian family. He left Iraq in 1979 and in 1985 he settled in Paris, where he started the small press Gilgamesh Editions. In 1996 he moved to London, where he has lived ever since. He is the founding editor of the most popular literary website in Arabic www.kikah.com and he co-founded Banipal, Magazine of Modern Arab Literature with Margaret Obank, with whom he also edited A Crack in the Wall, poems by sixty contemporary Arab poets. He has published two collection of poetry in Arabic in 1987 and 1995. His autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris, published in Arabic and English in 2005 was described by the Times Literary Supplement as “a forgiving and powerful book” and The Independent as “an Arabic answer to Miller’s Tropic of Cancer”.
was born in 1931 in Vancouver, Canada, and moved to Japan with her family just prior to World War II. In 1948, She entered the modernist poetry group VOU, led by the poet Katsue Kitazono, and published her first poetry collection in 1951. In the early 1960s, she started reading her poems at live jazz performances. Her publications include several books of poetry, which have been translated into many languages. She has been invited to readings all over the world, including poetry festivals and jazz festivals. She has also organized poetry events with poets such as Allan Ginsberg and Jehuda Amichai, whose works she has also translated. She has performed with musicians, dancers and artists, e.g. Kazuo Ono, Peter Brötzmann, Sam Rivers, Itaru Oki, and Aki Takase. She has received many major Japanese poetry prizes, including the prestigious Yomiuri Literary Prize and was also honoured with the Purple Ribbon Medal (Shijuhosho). Kazuko Shiraishi lives in Tokyo.
(1955) was born and grew up in Húsavík, north Iceland. After attending the Commercial College of Iceland in Reykjavík, he studied Icelandic language, music and acting. In 1977 he made his literary bebut with a book of poetry, Ósánar lendur (Virgin Soil). Since then he has published 12 books of poetry and translated poetry, one novel and 10 children´s books. Apart from books, he has also produced many recordings of his lyrics and songs. His most recent books of poetry are Eyðibýli (Abandoned Farms) 2004, with photographs by Nökkvi Eliasson, and Hjartaborg (Borough of the Heart) 2007. Sigurdsson lives in Reykjavík and works as a full-time writer, songwriter and publisher of music and literature.
graduated the Music Academy of Latvia and plays key instruments and guitar. She has worked mainly in the filed of folk music and children's music a soloist in the folk band Ornaments, head of a children folk studio and musical leader of the Youth Theatre of Riga. She has also worked for children's programmes of Latvian TV and radio as a script writer, composer, performer and actress. She released two solo albums, two albums of music for children, two albums of Latvian folk music and one solo disc in USA. Her songs have also been included in different music selections. She has composed music for documentary films and several theatre plays and set poetry to music. She has performed in a number of European countries, USA, Canada, Australia, Syria, Jordan and Iraq. She will perform her music composed for Turkish folk instruments to accompany the work of Latvian poets in Turkish translation.
born 1976, graduated from Zagreb Faculty of Philosophy with a degree in Comparative Literature and English Language and Literature, and also holds an MA in Gender Studies from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. She is a writer, translator, and a cultural, gender and film theorist. So far she has published a collection of short stories Adventures of Gloria Scott (AGM, Zagreb, 2005) and had numerous short stories published in Croatian and international literary magazines and similar publications such as Zarez, Vijenac, Quorum, Fantom slobode, Godine, Plima, Libra, Akt, Jutarnji list, Chroma Journal, Pulp.net, Studium, Literatura etc. Her stories have been included in several Croatian and international anthologies, such as Ekran stories, Queer stories, Best Croatian Stories of 2005, Na Trećem trgu – Anthology of New Short Story in BiH, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro and translated into English, German, Polish and Slovenian. In 2006 she spent a month in Graz as an artist in residence, supported by the Internationales Haus der Autoren Graz. She is a member of the editorial team of Sextures, E‐journal for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics, and on the editorial board of Ekviva ‐ the regional women's web portal. She has translated several books into Croatian and English and regularly translates fiction and theory. As a journalist, cultural and film critic she writes for various Croatian and international publications. In 2008 she was voted best Croatian film critic.
is a singer, musician, poet, crofter and mother of four who lives in Fair Isle, the remote island midway between Shetland and Orkney, where she was born and brought up. Her poetry has appeared in various publications and been translated into several European languages. Her booklet here was published by North Idea (2005). She has had the luck and fortune to sing in beautiful places such as Reykjavík and Brittany, Orkney, Washington DC and Glasgow apart from performing at home in Fair Isle and Shetland. Ivver Entrancin Wis, (Shetland Music 2008) is her new CD of settings of Shetland poetry by various poets set to music by Lise for cello, harp, viola and voice, and sung by her, launched with Fiddlers Bid at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall at this year’s Celtic Connections festival. http://www.myspace.com/lisesinclair
is a poet, writer and translator. He belongs to the Khasi tribe and writes in both Khasi and English. His short stories have been published in leading journals in India and translated into Hindi and Bengali. Nongkynrih is a Reader in the Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong. He has a total of five publications in Khasi and three in English besides edited volumes and translated works of poetry and short stories in both Khasi and English.
(1958, Sodankylä, Finnish Lapland) has worked in advertising and is an author of TV scripts, fantasy and science fiction whose short stories have won the Atorox Prize for Best Finnish Science Fiction six times. Her immensely successful debut fantasy novel Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi (Not Before Sundown, 2000) was awarded the Finlandia Prize and has been published in Czech, English, French, Japanese, Latvian and Swedish. An inventive mixture of science fiction, comic strip humour and Nordic folklore, Sinnisalo’s novel brings together the troll Pessi, the commercial photographer Mikael and sundry characters in a study of man's relationship to nature, as well as of the use of economic and sexual power in society and in human relationships.
is a Tamil writer and activist. Her works include more than 36 novels, 48 short novels, 150 short stories, 15 travelogues, 7 collections of articles, 13 collections of short stories, one talking book, 3 volumes of literary research, 2 volumes of anthologies, and 2 biographies. She is presently working on a project titled Knit India Through Literature. Her novels on various social issues have been filmed and serialized. Her works have been translated into many languages. She is the first writer to have narrated her story through video and audiotapes. She has also presented and anchored many talk shows. She has been honoured with Kasturi Srinivasan Award, Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award, Rajiv Gandhi National Integration Award and Prem Chand Rastriya Sahitya Samman for her literary achievements. She has also received many awards for her commitment in the field of social work.
(1967) lives in Bangor, Wales. Her most recent collection of poems, Remains of a Future City, was published by Seren in 2008, following The Mirror Trade in 2004. Her collaborations include Dark Wires, with Ian Davidson (West House Books, 2007) and From Here, with visual artist Simonetta Moro (Dusie, 2008). She has a PhD in Creative Writing and currently holds an AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts at Bangor University, where she is researching poetry and city space. She has been involved in several projects incorporating poetry, film and music, and is a member of the group Parking Non-Stop whose album Species Corridor was released by Klangbad in 2008. She is a co-editor of Skald and became Editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales in 2008.
poet and translator from around fifteen European languages, (1936) is considered one of the greatest contemporary Latvian poets and a unique personality in Latvian literature and culture. Sentenced to seven years in a concentration camp by the Soviet authorities in 1962, his books began to appear only after his release in the 1970s, and his poems written in the concentration camp were published in the 1990s. Skujenieks is disposed to experience every moment as a witness to the external: there is no future; each moment – or poem – is pregnant with the past and the present. A master of traditional forms, his poetry is cleansed of the mundane, with extremely complex, at times audacious metaphors. In 1995, Knuts Skujenieks received the highest official State award of Latvia, Three Star Order.
(formerly Kauranen) is one of the most interesting writers to have emerged in Finland in the past two decades. Her first novel, Sonja O kävi täällän (Sonja Was Here, 1981) the story of a young daughter of Russian immigrants, shocked readers with its sexual openness and became a cult book for the young generation of the 1980s. Since then, Snellman has published over ten novels, including Ihon Aika (Time of the Skin, 1993) Pelon mantiede (The Geography of Fear, 1995) and Aura (2000). Her work has been translated into Czech, Danish, Estonian, French, German, Swedish and Turkish. Anja Snellman lives in Helsinki.
(1970) was born in Bratislava. Solotruk graduated in English and American studies and in Slovak literature at Comenius University, Bratislava, where he now teaches, after spending some years in television and advertising. He has studied in the Azusa Pacific University, California, and the University of Warwick, UK. Solotruk’s first book of poetry Silent Wars (1997) won the Slovak Literary Fund Best Debut Award. It was followed by Grinding (2001), Plankton of Gravity (2006), and Lovestory: Agens and Patiens (2007). His poems appeared in several anthologies in Germany, Ireland, Great Britain, Italy, Mexico, and the US, including A Fine Line: New Poetry From Eastern and Central Europe (Arc Publications, 2004) and New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). Solotruk has read at festivals and events in numerous cities, including London, Vienna, Cracow, Berlin, Genova, Dublin, St. Andrews, Taipei, Firenze, Cartagena des Indias, San Jose, and elsewhere. He also translates poetry from English. His award winning book selections include works of Charles Simic, John Ashbery, and Ted Hughes.
was born in 1959 in Warsaw. The latest of his six collections of poetry is Zoom (2000) and his Selected Texts are being published in 2001. He has worked as editor and translator with the magazine Literatura na Swiecie. Among the authors he has translated are John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, John Cage, Ronald Firbank, Paul de Man and Ezra Pound. He lives in Warsaw and occasionally teaches American Poetry at Warsaw University.
is a novelist and short fiction writer. He studied Civil Engineering and Philosophy at the University of Montenegro, and published one novel, Hansenova djeca ( Hansen’s Children, 2004), and two collections of short stories, Sve to ( All That, 2001) and Zimska potraga ( Winter Search, 2007). Hansen’s Children won a 2004 Mesha Selimovic Award (the best novel published in 2004 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia) He works as journalist for the independent daily press, Vijesti, in Podgorica.
was born in 1957 in Limerick, Ireland. She has a degree in Creative Writing and works currently at the Limerick prison where she leads courses to eliminate illiteracy. Her first novel God on the Wall (1997) has been translated into French. White Lie is her second novel.
was born in 1982 in Sofia, Bulgaria. She graduated with a MA in Theory of Literature from Sofia University (2005-2006) with master thesis The genre of tragedy: Muthos and Doppelgangers. At present she is a PhD student at the Theory of Literature department where she is working on Event and Example in the order of Discourses for Literature: The Problem of Exemplarity Work which deals with the tension between literary examples and exemplarity work in philosophical and theoretical researches. Kamelia is a founder-member of the art-group Ustata (The Mouth), the purpose of which is to outline and visualise, to designate and enunciate the art of young artists. The art-group has organised poetry and visual medium events. She has published the collection of lyrics Parcel N: 17 ( Plot No17). Her works are translated in Danish, Croatian and German. As of 2009 she is the editor of Literaturen vestnik ( Literary Newspaper).
(1975) studied Russian language and literature and Librarianship in Ljubljana. She published two poetry books, Kutine (Quinces, 2003) and Lahko se zgodi karkoli (Anything can happen, 2007). Her writing regularly appears in Slovene literary magazines as well as abroad, and her poems have been translated into eight languages and included in two anthologies. Apart from translating poetry from English, Russian and Serbian (Robert Hass, Ana Ristović), she also writes film reviews and used to have a literary "chat-show" in Ljubljana’s night club Daktari.
is a poet, translator, lecturer in literature and cultural manager. He has published poetry (Rapala is the latest volume, 2007) and prose, and has edited various works on Catalan literature and the city of Barcelona. He has translated novels, poetry and song lyrics from English. Subirana was a member of the board of PEN Catalą and founded and directed the website Lletra at the Open University of Catalonia. From 2004 to 2006 he was Director of the Institute of Catalan Literature. As an editor, he produced Wilkommen in Katalonien (DTV, 2007) and New Catalan Fiction (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Dalkey Archive, Spring 2008), two selections of contemporary Catalan narrative. He keeps a blog entitled Flux. Subirana’s latest book has deserved critiques such as the following, by Pere Calonge: “Rapala uses a diversity of poetic forms to devise condense clean texts; poems of a great precision, brief but intense, like small bubbles which burst in the reader, thereby exuding a sensation, an image, an idea"
was born in Shkodra in 1975. After her studies in Albanian and International Literature she specialised in Public Relations. She graduated with a Master Degree in Counseling and Psychology (University of Sheffield: City Liberal Studies, Thessaloniki , Greece). Currently she is working as editor in Chief in Psychology Magazine. She is also Lecturer at Tirana University for the Faculty of Psychology. She has published several poetry and prose books.
lives in Vic near Barcelona and writes in Catalan. His poetry tests the limits of language and grammar, restoring meaning to language that has become empty with everyday usage. He also works with visual artists, writing about their work or combining text with images. He is the editor of poetry review Reduccions and of the review of contemporary culture Transversal, and co edits a poetry series Jardins de Samarcanda and of poetry anthologies Calaise de versos (A Drawer of Poetry). Among his recent books are Quadern de port and Quadern de bosc (Notebook of the Port and Notebook of the Forest) I si no neva? (What if it Doesn’t Snow?)
poet, writer and translator was born in Transylvania (Romania) and moved to Hungary in 1987. She studied English and Hungarian literature at the University of Budapest and received her PhD in English Renaissance literature in 2007. She was 23 when her first volume of poetry appeared, and received the Petőfi Prize (1996), founded for promising young poets. She has since published four more volumes of poetry and has received several literary prizes. She has translated many poems and lyrics, essays, novels, drama, radio plays and librettos, and writes essays, newspaper articles and reviews. She also worked for the British Council as a co-leader of a translators’ workshop in Budapest (2000-2004), as the co-editor of the homepage of the Hungarian Book Foundation and as a film critic and translator for the journal CINEMA (1997-2007); she is currently the poetry editor of the literary journal The Hungarian Quarterly which publishes Hungarian literature and essays in English.
is a leading figure of the eastern European poetical avant-garde and the most prominent Slovenian writer. He has a degree in Art History and before devoting himself to poetry, he worked as a curator and conceptual artist. To date he has published thirty-one books of poetry in Slovenian and has received many honours and awards, including the Preseren Prize, the Jenko Prize, the Pushcart Prize, a visiting Fulbright to Columbia University, and the University of Iowa International Writing Program Fellowship. He has served as Cultural Attaché to the Slovenian Embassy in New York, and is currently living in Berlin on a DAAD scholarship. Besides having his work appear in numerous journals internationally, he has had eight books published in English translation, including four collections of selected poetry The Selected Poems of Tomaz Salamun (1988); The Shepherd, the Hunter (1992); The Four Questions of Melancholy (1997); and Feast (2000), as well as Homage to Hat and Uncle Hugo and Eliot (1997) and A Ballad for Metka Krasovec (2001). He is married to painter Metka Krasovec.
was born in 1960 and grew up in a small village in Slovenia. He graduated in sociology and comparative literature from the University of Ljubljana, and left for Belgium in 1984, where he started to work in the travel business. A job opportunity brought him to London in 1992 where he lives with his partner of 12 years. He co-wrote a satirical novel Spolitika (The Politics of Sex), which was published in 1999 and his first collection of poems Darilo (The Gift) was published in 2006. He reviews books for various magazines in Slovenia on a regular basis and is preparing his second collection of poems.
was born in Slovenia and lives in Barcelona. She has translated various Slovenian and Serbian authors into Catalan (Makarovič, Jančar, Kiš, Pahor, Mozetič) and Catalan authors into Slovenian (Calders, Foix, Moncada, Todó), and has also published numerous literary studies in specialist reviews in Spain (Els Marges, L’Espill, Pasajes) and in Slovenia (Nova revija, Literatura, Dialogi). She is the author of L’estirp de la solitud (Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2003, and Ljubljana, Literatura, 2005), which won the Josep Carner prize for Literary Theory, and L’atzar de la lluita. El concepte d’Europa Central al llarg del segle XX (Valencia, Afers, 2005 and Maribor, Aristej, 2005).