BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC’s new collection, Hunting the Boar (CB editions) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. White Sheets (CB Editions, 2012), was a Forward Prize finalist; and her translation of Apollinaire The Little Auto won the Scott Moncrieff Prize. Her most recent translation is Yves Bonnefoy’s The Anchor’s Long Chain (Seagull).
CARMEN BUGAN is the author of Crossing the Carpathians; Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police; Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile and The House of Straw. Her latest collection of poems, Releasing the Porcelain Birds, is published this month.
MADELEINE CAMPBELL is a writer, researcher and translator. Her translations of Maghrebi poets have appeared in the University of California Book of North African Literature (2012) and Lighthouse (2015).
JULIA CASTERTON (1952–2007), poet and teacher, taught creative writing at London’s City Lit. In 2004, her first full-length collection of poems, The Doves of Finisterre (Rialto), won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection prize.
BHASKAR CHAKRABORTY (1945–2005) is a modern Bengali poet and writer. He was born in Baranagar, in the northern part of Calcutta. A teacher by profession, he published many collections of poetry. His debut When Will It be Winter, Suparna, in 1971, received immediate acclaim. His prose work includes a collection of his diary and personal journals, published posthumously in 2013. He died of lung cancer in 2005.
AMARJIT CHANDAN has published six collections of poetry, and five books of essays in Punjabi. Collections of his poems in English versions include Being Here (1995, 1999, 2005), Sonata for Four Hands prefaced by John Berger (Arc, 2010), The Parrot, The Horse & The Man (Arc, due in 2016)
DAVID COLMER is an Australian writer and translator and the winner of several translation prizes. He focuses on Dutch and Flemish literature, but occasionally translates German and, very occasionally, Indonesian – the latter with a lot of help from his friends.
MOLLY CRABAPPLE is an artist, journalist, and author of the memoir Drawing Blood. Called ‘An emblem of the way art can break out of the gilded gallery’ by the New Republic, she has drawn in and reported from Guantanamo Bay, Abu Dhabi’s migrant labour camps, and in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and Iraqi Kurdistan.
CHRISTINE DE LUCA, who writes in both English and Shetlandic, is a native Shetlander who lives in Edinburgh. She was appointed Edinburgh’s Makar (poet laureate) in 2014. Her latest collection, Dat Trickster Sun (Mariscat 2014) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet Prize.
NED DENNY was born in London in 1975. His poems have appeared in PN Review, Poetry Review, The White Review and the TLS.
MOHAMMED DIB (1920–2003) was born in Tlemcen. He is a key founder of Francophone Algerian literature with over twenty novels, several collections of short stories and nine poetry collections.
TENZIN DICKIE’s poetry and essays have appeared in Indian Literature, Seminar Magazine, Apogee Journal, Tibetan Review, Cultural Anthropology and the anthologies Voices in Exile and The Yellow Nib: Modern English Poetry by Indians. Her translations have appeared in The Washington Post online and Words Without Borders. She was a 2014 fellow of the American Literary Translators’ Association.
DON MEE CHOI is the author of Hardly War (Wave Books, April 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and translator of contemporary Korean women poets.
EMMA GEE is a lecturer in Classics at St Andrews. She has published academic books on Ovid, and on Aratus’ ‘Phaenomena’, an astronomical poem of the third century CE, and its Latin translations.
JUAN GELMAN’s (1930–2014) first poetry collection was published in 1956. Following the Argentine Coup in 1976, Gelman was forced into exile in Europe, his son, daughter and pregnant daughter-in-law were ‘disappeared’ during the dictatorship. In 2007, he received the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish language literature prize for lifetime achievement.
GEMORAW was an Ethiopian poet, academic, linguist and democracy campaigner born in Addis Ababa in 1935. He was forced to flee in the mid 1970s to China, then Norway and Sweden. He died in Sweden in November, 2014.
ELIZABETH T. GRAY, JR. is a poet, translator, and corporate consultant. SERIES | INDIA, a collection of original poems, was published by Four Way Books in 2015. Her translations from classical and contemporary Persian include The Green Sea of Heaven: Fifty Ghazals from the Diwan-i Hafiz-i Shirazi (1995) and Iran: Poems of Dissent (2013). www.elizabethtgrayjr.com.
OLAV GRINDE recently published Luminous Spaces: Olav H. Hauge: Selected Poems & Journals (White Pine Press, Buffalo, 2016), and previously Night Open: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen (White Pine Press, 1993).
BASUKI GUNAWAN was an Indonesian sociologist who lived and worked in the Netherlands and wrote in Indonesian, Dutch and English. Besides several academic books, he published poetry, short stories and a novella. He also translated Indonesian poetry into Dutch, in collaboration with his wife Liselotte Gunawan-Grote.
BAYDAA HADAYA, an Assyrian poet from Baghdede, Nineveh Plains (now under ISIS control), writes both in Assyrian and Arabic and is a member of Baghdede Literary Forum. She has performed and published her poetry in Iraq’s most respected literary festivals and journals. After a long displacement, Hadaya has now moved to the USA.
GËZIM HAJDARI was born in Lushnje, Albania in 1957 and fled his homeland for Italy in 1992. He has received numerous awards for his poetry and is considered a leading voice among migrant poets writing in Italian. He publishes his poetry in rigorously dual-language collections, as he writes in both Albanian and Italian and resists the notion of either version as a translation of an original.
GOLAN HAJI is a Syrian Kurdish poet and translator who currently lives in France. His most recent poetry collection Autumn Here is Magical and Vast was published in a bilingual Arabic/Italian edition by Il Sirente, Rome, 2013. His latest translation is Alberto Manguel’s A Reader on Reading, Dar Al- Saqi, Beirut, 2016.
BARZAN ABDUL GHANI JARJIS is an Assyrian poet and novelist from Baghdede, Nineveh Plains and a member of the Syriac Writers’ Union and the Al-Hadbaa Forum for Folk Poetry in Mosul. Like many other writers from Baghdede, he too is living in a makeshift refugee camp in Ankawa, Iraq.
LOUISE LABÉ (c.1522–66) published her Works (sonnets, elegies and a prose dialogue) in 1555. They met with both notoriety and success.
NINEB LAMASSU writes his poetry in the Modern Assyrian language and his poetry has been translated into English, Spanish, Swedish, Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish and Farsi. His recently published collection Stolen Title refers to the centennial of the Assyrian, Armenian and Pontus-Greek genocide of 1915 and ISIS crimes in Syria and Iraq.
CAROLINE MALDONADO is a poet and translator. Recent publications include her pamphlet of poems What they say in Avenale (Indigo Dreams Publishing 2014) and Your call keeps us awake, (Smokestack 2013), poems by Rocco Scotellaro co-translated with Allen Prowle from Italian. She lives in London and Italy.
CAITLÍN MAUDE (1941–1982) was an Irish poet, playwright, actress and traditional singer. A volume of her collected poems was published posthumously by Coiscéim.
OLIVIA MCCANNON’s translations include Balzac’s Old Man Goriot. Her poetry collection Exactly My Own Length won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.
ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY translates fiction and poetry from the French and the Italian. His debut collection of poetry The Promised Land will be published by Penguin in 2017.
MAJID NAFICY fled Iran in 1983, a year and a half after the execution of his wife Ezzat in Tehran. Since 1984 Majid has lived in West Los Angeles. Naficy’s poetry has been widely anthologized, and he has published two collections of poetry in English, Muddy Shoes (Beyond Baroque, Books, 1999) and Father and Son (Red Hen Press, 2003).
DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA is a bilingual poet, awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary by Paula Meehan. Her first collection of poems in English is Clasp.
ABDALLA NURI writes in both Assyrian and Arabic. He has two published collections and his poetry has been published in a number of Middle Eastern literary journals. He is also a member of the Syriac Writers’ Union and a member of the Iraqi Writers’ Union. Nuri is from Baghdede on the Nineveh Plains but is currently living in a makeshift refugee camp in Ankawa, Iraq.
JAMIE OSBORN founded Cambridge Student PEN to support human rights for writers and through writing both locally and internationally. Updates on Cambridge Student PEN’s work are posted at: www.facebook.com/officialcambridgeunipen
NASRIN PARVAZ became a civil rights activist when the Islamic regime took power in Iran. She was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death in 1982. She fled to England after her release, where she claimed asylum in 1993. She was granted refugee status a year later, and has since lived in London. Nasrin’s prison memoir was published in Farsi in 2002 and was published in Italian in 2006 by Effedue Edizioni.
KEITH PAYNE is the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award winner for 2015-2016. His debut collection, Broken Hill, (Lapwing Publications, 2015), will be followed by Six Galician Poets, (Arc Publications, 2016). Keith lives in Vigo, Galicia with the musician Su Garrido Pombo.
AMIR POLIS IBRAHIM is an Assyrian poet and novelist from Baretle, Nineveh Plains (now under ISIS control). He writes both in Assyrian and Arabic. He is a member of the Syriac and Iraqi Writers’ Union. He currently lives in a makeshift refugee camp in Ankawa, Iraq.
CLARE POLLARD’s most recent collection Changeling was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her latest book, a new version of Ovid’s Heroines, is currently touring as a one-woman show with Jaybird Live Literature. Her website is www.clarepollard.com
TODD PORTNOWITZ’s poems, Italian translations, and essays have appeared in PN Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Poesia, Poetry Salzburg Review, AGNI and elsewhere. He is co-founder and co-editor of the Italian poetry blog, Formavera, and a poetry editor with the Sheep Meadow Press.
CAROLINE PRICE is a musician and writer living in Kent. She has published short stories and three collections of poetry, most recently Wishbone (Shoestring Press 2008), and has translated poetry and prose for the 44th and 45th International Poetry Festivals in Rotterdam (2013 and 2014).
YOUSIF M. QASMIYEH is Lector in Arabic at the Oxford University Language Centre. His poetry and translations have appeared in Critical Quarterly, Modern Poetry in Translation, and GeoHumanities.
ARNE RUSTE’s first collection, Askeladd (Ash Lad), was published in 1973. He has published ten poetry collections, culminating in 2012 in a Collected, Kretsløp (Flow) 2012, which includes newer ‘Occasional Poems’ , 2002-2012. He has translated several Sufi poets as well as Ted Hughes and the war poems of Wilfred Owen (2014); and rhymes for children by Roald Dahl and Julia Donaldson.
RIBKA SIBHATU (1962–) was born in Eritrea and writes in Tigrinya and Italian. She was unjustly imprisoned for a year in 1979 and on her release she fled to Ethiopia. She now lives in Italy and combines writing and activism on behalf of migrants.
ALEMU TEBEJE is an Ethiopian journalist, poet and web-campaigner based in London. His poems have been published in the anthologies Forever Spoken and No Serenity Here, featuring 26 poets from 12 African countries. His website is: www.debteraw.com
HABIB TENGOUR is an Algerian writer, poet and anthropologist. Born in Mostaganem in 1947, he and his family moved to France while he was still a child and he travels between and lectures in both countries. He is considered a major voice among contemporary North African Francophone writers. A selection of his work translated into English by Pierre Joris, Exile is my Trade, was published in 2012 by Black Widow Press.
MAYA TEVET DAYAN (1975–) is an Israeli poet and writer currently residing in Canada. Her poems have been translated into English and Russian and have appeared in books and various other venues. She holds a PhD in Sanskrit Poetry and is currently a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia.
SHASH TREVETT is a Tamil from Sri Lanka, who came to the UK to escape from the civil war. She has been published in MPT and Interpreters House. She read at the First World War commemoration events in Yorkshire, and at the 2015 York Literature Festival. She has been recorded by the British Library sound archive for their ‘Between Two Worlds: Poetry & Translation Project’.
HAMA TUMA is an important Ethiopian political activist, poet and writer of satirical articles and short stories. His first collection of stories, The Case of the Socialist Witch Doctor and Other Stories, was published by Heinemann London in 1993. He lives in Paris. His website is www.hamatuma.com
WANG WEI WANG WEI (699–761), a contemporary of the better known Li Po and Tu Fu, was in his lifetime as celebrated for his paintings as for his poetry. He had a successful career as a court official, yet after the deaths of his wife and mother spent increasing periods in the solitude of his Wang (literally ‘wheel rim’) River estate.
STEPHEN WATTS is a poet, translator and long-time contributor to MPT. His collection Republic of Dogs / Republic of Birds was published in 2016 by Test Centre.
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