Authors/Contributors

Siddiq Aalam was born in 1952 in a small town Purulia in India and since 1983 has lived in Calcutta, a city which is the background of his first novel Charnock ki Kashti. He holds an M.A. in...

M Aan Mansyur works as a community librarian at Katakerja, a social and creative space in Makassar, and is the program curator for the Makassar International Writers Festival. He is the...

A Congolese writer born in Goma, Sinzo Aanza lives and works in Kinshasa. He is very active on the Congolese artistic scene, where he collaborates with visual artists and authors on...

Of Turkish descent, this writer of short stories and fiction was born in Adapazan. While pursuing his higher education, his desires conflicted with that of his father’s; originally...

Ines Abassi (born 1982) is a Tunisian poet, children`s writer, translator, and novelist. She has published three volumes of poetry, including Secrets of the Wind (2004), winner of...

Carmine Abate was born in Calabria, southern Italy. He immigrated to Germany at a young age and now lives in Trentino, northern Italy, where he teaches university. His first book, a collection...

Sayyid Nasim Abbas is a Shi'a Muslim scholar and preacher based in Lahore.

Azra Abbas was born in 1948 in Karachi. She earned her master’s degree in Urdu from Kara­chi University and went on to teach Urdu literature at a government college in Karachi....

Rasha Abbas is a Syrian journalist and writer of short stories. She is currently based in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2008, she published her first collection, Adam Hates the Television, and was...

Abdilatif Abdalla was born in Mombasa, Kenya, in 1946 to a renowned literary family and began composing poetry as a teenager. After publishing a political pamphlet questioning the...

Basma Abdel Aziz is a psychiatrist, writer, and sculptor. A long-standing vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, she is the author of several works of nonfiction. In 2016 she was...

Mohammed Abdelnabi is an Egyptian writer born in 1977. He obtained a BA in languages and translation from the English and Simultaneous Translation Department of Al-Azhar University and...

Salar Abdoh’s most recent book is Tehran at Twilight. He lives in Tehran and in New York, where he teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing program at the City College of New York. Photo...

Kader Abdolah (born 1952 in Iran) studied physics in Tehran and was active in the student resistance. He published two novels about life under the Khomeini regime before fleeing his homeland in...

Shamshad Abdullaev (b. 1957) is the leading poet of the so-called “Fergana School” (for its “manifesto,” see Modern Poetry in Translation). Abdullaev has been...

Kareem Abdulrahman is a London-based Kurdish translator and journalist, currently working for the BBC. Ghazalnus and the Gardens of Imagination is his first book-length translation in...

Hashitha Abeywardana works in development. He writes and translates both prose and verse. His translations include Ba Jin's Autumn in Spring and A Sivanandan's When Memory...

Azhar Abidi was born in Pakistan in 1968. After studying in England and Australia, he co-founded the literary magazine Cipher, which published the works of Pakistani writers writing in English...

Marguerite Abouet was born in Abidjan in 1971. At the age of twelve, she was sent with her older brother to study in France under the care of a great-uncle. She now lives in Romainville, a...

Hosam Aboul-Ela teaches in the department of English and the program in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston. He has lived most of his life in two exotic foreign...

Frits Abrahams is a daily columnist for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

Eric Abrahamsen is a freelance translator and literary scout in Beijing, where he has lived since 2001. His translations have appeared in the Asia Literary Review and The Guardian, among other...

Caio Fernando Abreu (1948–96) was born in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in 1948. An award-winning journalist, writer, and dramatic adviser, he portrayed like no other the myriad...

Manuel Silva Acevedo was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1942. His books of poems include: Perturbaciones (1967), Lobos y ovejas (1976), Mester de Bastardía (1977), Monte de Venus (1979),...

André Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir, False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory, and Call Me By Your Name, a novel. He is also the co-author and editor of The Proust...

Elliot Ackerman, author of the critically acclaimed novels Dark at the Crossing and Green on Blue, has covered the Syrian Civil War since 2013. His writings have appeared...

Suzane Adam was born in Satu Mare, Transylvania, and came to Israel at age ten. She completed her art studies majoring in medieval art, photography, and etching. She later went on to study...

André-Marcel Adamek  (1946–2011) was Belgium’s finest contemporary storyteller. The author of more than fifteen books of fiction, poetry, and teleplays, he has been a...

Gabriela Adamesteanu was born in 1942 in Targu Ocna, Romania. She has worked in literary and scientific publishing and has been the editor in chief of the magazine 22 since 1991. She is the...

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925 to a Greek Christian mother and a Muslim Syrian father. In 1949 she left Lebanon and was educated in Paris, New York, and California. She taught in...

Born in 1930 in Qassabin, Northern Syria, Adonis divides his life between his home country, Lebanon, and France. A critic and reviewer, Adonis is above all a poet. He has been building a lyrical...

Ae-ran Kim was born in Incheon in 1980 and graduated from the playwriting department of the Korean National University of Arts Theater School. Kim debuted in 2002 with the receipt of the first...

Kathrin Aehnlich, engineer turned successful author, began her writing career in 1985 at the Deutsches Literatur Institut in Leipzig. Her creative final paper, “When I am grown up—I...

Agnès Agboton is a philologist and scholar of the Beninese oral tradition. She has published two bilingual Gun/Spanish poetry books in Spain, Canciones del poblado y el...

José Eduardo Agualusa was born in Huambo, Angola, in 1960. For a number of years he lived in Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro, but has now returned to Angola. He is the author of The Book Of...

Cristhiano Aguiar is a writer and essayist. Born in Campina Grande, Paraíba, in 1981, he has lived in Recife, Berlin, Olinda, São Paulo, and Berkeley. In 2012, he was a visiting...

Kajal Ahmad was born in 1967 in Kirkuk, a disputed city in Iraq with a strong Kurdish population. A poet, journalist, and social critic, she has published four books: Benderî...

Naja Marie Aidt was born in the small settlement of Aasiaat, Greenland, where her father taught and where the family lived until moving back to Copenhagen when she was seven. As a child she...

A prolific novelist, playwright, essayist, and translator, César Aira has published around forty novels, as well as short stories, essays, and plays. He is one of the most important authors...

Airuo was born in 1971 in Tongcheng, Anhui Province, and now lives in Beijing. He was formerly the executive deputy editor in chief of Travel China (magazine) and editor in chief of the website...

Santiago Domínguez Aké, born in 1951 in Muxupip, Yucatán, has been working since 1981 as an artist in the Yucatan regional administration. In 1997, his work "Kool tu...

Humberto Ak'abal writes in Kichè (Maya) at his home far from his birthplace (1952) in Momostenango, Totonicapán, Guatemala. He is one of the most widely translated poets writing...

Semyon Viktorovich Akhrameev was born in Tokmok, a small provincial town in the north of the Kyrgyz Republic. He graduated from the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University as a Linguist and Translator...

Muhammad Khalid Akhtar (1920–2002) was born in Allahbad Tehsil of the state of Bahawalpur. He studied in Bahawalpur and Lahore and in 1946 went to England for his postgraduate training in...

Shaheen Akhtar is the author of five collections of short stories and three novels—Palabar Path Nei [No Escape Route]; Talaash [The Search]; and Shokhi Rongomala. Talaash won the Best Book...

The Saudi writer Badriyah Al-Bishr studied literature and social sciences at King Saud University, Riyadh and the Lebanese University in Beirut. She is now a journalist, writing literary and...

Born in 1975, Bahraini poet Ali Al Jallawi began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. His early work was characterized by revolutionary and political ideas, and he was imprisoned for three...

Salwa Al Neimi was born in Damascus. Since the mid seventies, she has lived in Paris, where she studied Islamic philosophy and theatre at the Sorbonne. She has published five volumes of poetry...

Wajdi Muhammad Abduh al-Ahdal is a Yemeni novelist, author of short stories, screenwriter, and dramatist. In 2010 an extremist campaign against his 2002 novel Qawarib Jabaliya (Mountain...

Fatima Yousef al-Ali, a Kuwaiti author, was born in 1953. Her thesis at Cairo University dealt with Kuwaiti women and the short story. She has published, in Arabic, a novel, Wujuh fi-l-Ziham...

Mohammed Al-Asfar's writing has been described as an expression of the grief of living under dictatorship. In this way, his work describes the unsaid and unmentionable. His characters are a...

Fadhil al-Azzawi was born in 1940 in Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. He studied English literature at Baghdad University, earning a B.A. degree, then earned a PhD in cultural journalism at Leipzig...

Nagi Al-Badawi is a Sudanese writer who leads an active literary career. Along with several poems and literary essays published in local and regional magazines, Al-Badawi has published a...

Badriyya al-Badri is an Omani poet and novelist. She composes poetry in Classical and colloquial Arabic. She has participated in many local and regional Gulf events and competitions. Her published...

Na'am al-Baz is an Egyptian journalist who has written for Al-Akhbar newspaper.

Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Fagih is one of the world's most renowned authors, poets, critics and lecturers on the topic of Arabic literature. Fagih has produced a large body of work, including Valley...

Gamal al-Ghitani was born in 1945 and educated in Cairo. He published thirteen novels and six collections of short stories and was editor in chief of the literary review Akhbar al-adab. He died in...

Salah Al-Hamdani is an Iraqi poet. His poem, "Words," which appears here on Words Without Borders, is taken from the collection Baghdad My Beloved (2003) and it echoes the author's familiar...

Abdelkader al-Hosni is a Syrian poet.

Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 1200 CE) was a famous scholar of religion, history, and law, as well as a prominent preacher in the mosques of Baghdad. He was an adherent to the Hanbali school and teacher...

Nadia Al-Kokabany is a Yemeni academic and a prolific literary writer. Her fiction has been translated into English, French, German, and Italian, and she has won prizes in Yemen and Kuwait....

Born in 1948 in Ghadames Oasis, Ibrahim al-Koni was brought up on the tradition of the Tuaregs, popularly known as "the veiled men" or "the blue men." Mythological elements,...

Nazik al-Mala'ika was born in Baghdad in 1923. Both a poet and a literary critic, she has published over fifteen volumes of poetry, prose, and criticism since her diwan appeared in 1947. Her...

Abdulaziz al-Omairi is an Omani poet and journalist. He was born in Bahla, Oman in 1983. Al-Omairi has participated in and won several poetry competitions in the Sultanate of Oman as well as...

Adil al-Qassas began to write short stories in the early 1980s, but was not able to publish them until 1985, after the collapse of an oppressive military dictatorship.  His...

Hasiba Abd al-Rahman is a Syrian poet and human rights activist. Her novel al-Sharnaqa (The Cocoon), based on her prison diaries and writing and published eight years after her release, is the...

Born in Iraq in 1967, Muhsin Al-Ramli is a writer, poet, translator, and lecturer, and writes in Arabic and Spanish. Saddam Hussein’s regime harassed his family and condemned his brother,...

Abd al-Khaliq al-Rikabi was born in Diyalah, Iraq. He studied at the Academy of Fine Art, Baghdad, and started writing as a poet, later turning to fiction writing. He has published seven novels...

Aisha al-Saifi was born in Nizwa, Oman in 1987 and studied Civil Engineering at Sultan Qaboos University. In 2005, she began publishing literary works in Omani and Arabic newspapers. She has...

Hanan al-Shaykh was born in Lebanon and grew up in Beirut. After leaving Lebanon in 1975, she moved between England and the Gulf States and has lived in London since 1984. Her novels include...

The Iraqi poet and writer Manal Al-Sheikh was born in Nineveh in northern Iraq and earned a degree in English-Arabic translation from the College of Arts at Mosul University. She has worked in the...

Yusuf al-Shirbini wrote his primary work, Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded [Hazz al-Quhuf bi-Sharh Qasid Abi Shaduf ], in or shortly after 1686. His only other known work is...

Miral al-Tahawy was born in Sharqiya in the Egyptian Delta into a Bedouin family of the al-Hanadi tribe. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature and...

Abd el-Salam al-Ujayli was born in 1918 in the northern Syrian city of al-Riqqa, on the Euphrates River. A physician by training, he started a clinic in his home town where he still practices....

Mashiul Alam was born in northern Bangladesh in 1966. He graduated in Journalism from the Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow in 1993. Currently he works at Prothom Alo, the leading...

David Albahari was born in Serbia and lived for many years in Canada. He now divides his time between Belgrade and Calgary. He has published thirteen books of short stories, fifteen novels, six...

Mitchell Albert is the London-based publisher and commissioning editor of Garnet and Ithaca Press, two imprints specializing in nonfiction from and about the Middle East. In 2015 he created...

Adolfo Albertazzi was born in Bologna in 1865. Before his death in 1924, he had produced thirty-three volumes of fiction, literary criticism, and history. In addition to critical studies on...

Rafael Alberti (1902–1999) was a Spanish poet and visual artist and a member of the "Generation of '27," an influential group of avant-garde poets. He wrote several books of...

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic and scholar; he teaches in the department of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures and in the Medieval Studies Program and...

Miguel Alcantud is the creator and artistic director of Microteatro, a theatrical format with venues in fourteen cities in the United States, Spain, and Mexico, among others. He has directed four...

Hélène Aldeguer is an illustrator and comic artist who writes about political and social matters and foreign affairs. She won the Prix de la Fondation Raymond Leblanc...

Ricardo Aleixo was born in 1960 in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. He is best known for his poetry’s visual and social characteristics and he is considered one of Brazil’s most...

Dragan Aleksić (1901–64) was a Yugoslav poet, journalist, and filmmaker, as well as the initiator of Yugoslav Dada. He contributed articles about Dada to the Yugoslav avant-garde...

Vassilis Alexakis was born in Athens and divides his time between Paris, Athens, and Tinos. The author of over fifteen works of fiction in Greek and French, he has won numerous awards for his...

Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel laureate in literature, was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankivsk, the daughter of a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother. When the...

Born in Athens in 1976, Marigo Alexopoulou graduated from the University of Athens with a BA in Classics and Philosophy. She has written two collections of poems, Faster than Light (2000) and...

Born in 1958, Mohammed Algharbi Amran is a Yemeni novelist, short-story writer, contemporary history buff, and literary critic.  He has been active in literary societies, serving as a...

Jokha Alharthi was born in 1978 and educated in Oman and the UK. She obtained her PhD in classical Arabic literature from Edinburgh University, and works as associate professor in...

Bakhtiyar Ali is a prominent contemporary Kurdish writer from Iraq. Ali, who lives in Germany, is a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and columnist. He has published dozens of books, including...

Qanbar Ali Tabesh was born in 1969 in Sangshanda village near Ghazni in Afghanistan. He fled from the war in Afghanistan to Iran, where he settled in the city of Qom. He has a B.A. in Persian...

Behnaz Alipour Gaskari, born in 1969, is a writer and literary critic. Her first work of fiction, a collection of short stories titled Let’s Move On, was published in 2005 and earned her the...

Omani poet and writer Reem Allawati has published three poetry collections: Premature Dementia (2006), Comedy of Confusion (2008), and Electronic...

Esther Allen's translations include the Penguin Classics anthology José Martí: Selected Writings, Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia by José Manuel...

Jocelyne Allen is a Japanese translator based in Toronto, Canada, after a decade in Japan. During her time in the Land of the Rising Sun, she worked as a magazine columnist, interpreted for...

Dan Allon is an Israeli multi-disciplinary artist. He studied comics at Shenkar College and has published newspaper columns, 2 fanzines, and 5. His graphic novels and his stories have been...

Guatemalan author D. W. Coop Allred was staff writer and cartoonist at Revue for ten years. His books include The Zen of Pues, the world's sole journalistic...

Germano Almeida was born in 1945 on the island of Boa Vista, Cape Verde. He studied law in Lisbon and lives on the island of Sao Vincente, where he works as a lawyer. In 1989 he founded the...

Osama Alomar is a Syrian poet and short story writer. He is the author of The Teeth of the Comb and Other Stories and Fullblood Arabian, both published by New Directions, and...

Marcos Matías Alonso is a member of the National Assembly of Indigenous People for Autonomy and the National Indigenous Congress. He holds a degree in anthropology and research grants...

Nancy Alonso was born in Havana and graduated from the University of Havana with a degree in biology in 1972. She was a professor and researcher at the Havana Institute of Medical Science for...

Taleb Alrefai was born in Kuwait in 1958. He began writing short stories while a student in the 1970s, publishing them in Kuwaiti newspapers. Later, his literary essays, columns, and short stories...

Saud Alsanousi is a Kuwaiti novelist and journalist, born in 1981. His work has appeared in a number of Kuwaiti publications, including Al-Watan newspaper and Al-Arabi, Al-Kuwait and Al-Abwab...

Antonio Altarriba was born in Zaragoza in 1952. Son of an anarchist and a nun, to use his own words, his youth was divided between Zaragoza and France, where his father maintained numerous...

Juan Álvarez was born in Neiva, Colombia, in 1978. He earned his MFA in Spanish and English at the University of Texas-El Paso and his PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia...

Núria Amat was born in Barcelona in 1951. She has since lived in Colombia, Mexico, Berlin, Paris, and the United States. Amat teaches courses on Archival Sciences and Technology and is...

Yehuda Amichai was born in Wurzburg, Germany, in 1924 and emigrated with his family to Palestine in 1936. He later became a naturalized Israeli citizen. Although German was his native language,...

Although Hasif Amini studied economics at the University of Indonesia, his interest in literature led him to change course and become a freelance translator, essayist, and editor. He served as...

Tina Åmodt was born in 1985 in Askøy and lives in Oslo. She is the author of Anleggsprosa (Construction prose), Syntesen (Synthesis), and Det blir aldri lyst her (The light never...

Algerian poet Djamal Amrani was born in 1935 in Sour El Gozlane. Central to his life and work were his involvement in the Algerian liberation movement, and his arrest and torture by the French...

Sole Anatrone is a visiting professor of Italian studies at Wesleyan University. She holds a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley and her research focuses on gender, race,...

Andry Andraina (1922–2006) was an extremely well-known author in Madagascar. He was a member of the national writers’ association and an active member of the Académie Malgache....

Iharilanto Patrick Andriamangatiana is a member of the Académie Nationale Malgache and the current president of Madagascar’s writers union. As an author, he is prolific in both French...

Hana Andronikova is a widely-published Czech writer. She received the Magnesia Litera Award in 2002 for her first novel, Zvuk slunecnich hodin [The Sound of the Sundial] (2001) and went on to...

Poet and essayist Antonella Anedda (Anedda-Angioy) was born in Rome to a Sardinian family. She studied in Rome and Venice. Her work comprises poems and essays, as well as translations, primarily...

Ralph Angel was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1951. He received a Masters of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Irvine, and has lived in and around Los Angeles ever since. He...

Milo De Angelis, born in Milan in 1951, is the author of five books of poetry, as well as a volume of stories and one of essays. He has also published translations of several modern French...

Jeffrey Angles (1971– ) is a professor of Japanese and translation at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in...

John Anspach graduated from Boston College in 2012 with a degree in English. He works and reads in New York City.

Born in the early 1980s, Nine Antico is a French illustrator and cartoonist. She started her career with a fanzine, Rock This Way, in which she combined her two passions: rock and illustrations....

César Antonio Molina (La Coruña, 1952) holds degrees in law and information science. His dissertation, La prensa literaria española, was published in three volumes.  He...

Sinan Antoon (Baghdad, 1967) is a poet, novelist, scholar, and translator. He holds degrees from Baghdad, Georgetown, and Harvard, where he earned a doctorate in Arabic literature. He has...

Taras Antypovych (born 1978)  is a Ukrainian writer and journalist. He lives in Kyiv, Ukraine. He is the author of 4 books of prose. His first novel “Miseria” (2007) was named...

Wang Anyi (b. 1954) is among the most widely read and anthologized authors of the post-Mao era. A breaker of taboos, she is considered a spokesperson for China's younger generation. Her...

Johannes Anyuru (b. 1979) is a poet, novelist, and playwright. He made his debut in 2003 with the critically acclaimed collection of poems Only the Gods Are New. A Storm Blew in from...

Nathacha Appanah, a French-Mauritian of Indian origin, was born in Mauritius and worked there as a journalist before moving to France in 1998. The Last Brother, her fourth novel, won the Prix de...

René Appel (1945) was till 2003 professor of Dutch as a second language at the University of Amsterdam. In the early seventies he wrote short stories for literary magazines. In 1987 his...

Elizabeth Applegate holds a Ph.D. in French literature from New York University.  Her research focuses on testimony and on literary and theatrical representations of the 1994 Tutsi genocide...

Miguelángel López (Vito Apushana) was born in 1965 in Carraipia, Colombia. Poet, professor at the University of La Guijaira, and television producer, his works of poetry...

Maya Arad was born in Israel in 1971 and grew up in Kibbutz Nahal-Oz. She graduated in classics and linguistics at the Tel Aviv University and has a Ph.D. in linguistics from London University....

Takako Arai was born in 1966 in Kiryū, a city in central Japan known for textile production. Her father managed a small, cottage-style weaving factory located on the family property, and at...

Fernando Aramburu was born in San Sebastian in 1959. He was a founding member of CLOC, a group of Art and DisArt that combined countercultural expression with the practice of surrealistic humor....

Francisco Proaño Arandi was born in Cuenca, Ecuador, in 1944. In 1982 he was awarded Segunda Mencion in the Plural Concurso Internacional de Cuentos in Mexico for his story...

Maria Ivanovna Arbatova was born in 1957. She studied in the Faculty of Philosophy in the Moscow State University, in the Dramatic Arts division of the Gorky Literary Institute, and underwent...

Triunfo Arciniegas is a prolific author of stories and plays, with over twenty books in print. He has won several prizes for his work, including the Premio Enka de Literatura Infantil in 1989...

Vilma Arêas was born in Campos, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1936. For many years, she was professor of Brazilian literature at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp). She made her...

María Negroni was born in Rosario, Argentina. She has published eleven books of poetry, three collections of essays, and two novels, as well as works in translation from French and...

Asmaa Alghoul was born in 1982 in Rafah, a Gazan city bordering Egypt whose population is mainly Palestinian refugees. At the age of 18, Alghoul won the Palestinian Youth Literature Award. In...

Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles’s works and interests encompass books, conceptual writing, translation, film and video, installation, found objects, and text-based experimentation....

Aurora Arias (Santo Domingo, 1962– ) is a poet and fiction writer, and considered one of the most important members of her poetic generation, “the generation of the 80s.” She...

Jakob Arjouni was born in Frankfurt in 1964. He has written novels, plays, screenplays, and the mystery series Happy Birthday, Turk!, One Man, One Murder, and Kismet. His other publications...

Arngunnur Árnadóttir (b. 1987 in Reykjavík) is an Icelandic poet and musician. She studied clarinet at Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” in Berlin and...

Born in Damascus, Aïcha Arnaout has been living in Paris since 1978. A poet and a novelist, she writes in French and in Arabic. Her poems have been translated into several languages. Her...

Marco Arnaudo was born and grew up in Cuneo, Italy. He has a PhD in Italian Literature from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard...

Rito Ramón Aroche was born in Havana in 1961. Las fundaciones (poetry) won the 2006 Gaceta de Cuba prize. Other recent collections include Del rio que durando se destruye (Letras Cubanas,...

Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro is a Puerto Rican writer. She's published books that promote the discussion of Afroidentity and sexual diversity. She is the Director of the Department of...

Khadija Arouhal is an Tamazight-language poet from the Tiznit region in Morocco. She is considered one of the female ambassadors of Tamazight language and culture, participating in festivals...

Badr Shakir as-Sayyab (1926–1964) was a much-censored Iraqi poet who was one of the first Arab poets to break with classical form and was known for his use of the ancient myths of rebirth...

Ani Asatryan was born around the time of Armenia’s independence from the Soviet Union. She is a student at the College of Contemporary Art, where she studies the history and theory of...

Genevieve L. Asenjo is professor of literature and creative writing and chair of the Department of Literature at De La Salle University, Manila. She writes in three major Philippine languages...

One of Egypt's leading writers, Radwa 'Ashur has published a number of novels and collections of short stories in Arabic. She is perhaps best known for her Granada Trilogy (Thulathiyyat...

Kjell Askildsen (b. 1929) is considered a master of short stories. He entered the literary scene in 1953 with the collection of short stories From Now on I'll Take You All the Way Home,...

Ratik Asokan is a freelance writer based in New York. He writes about literature, film, and photography. You can read all his work here.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is recognized by critics as Brazil's greatest writer. Among his novels, Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas are...

Born in Drama (northern Greece) in 1981, Dimitris Athinakis is a Greek poet, editor, literary translator and critic. His first book of poetry, Horisemis, was published in 2009; his forthcoming...

Damara Atrigol Pratt is a writer based in Los Angeles and New York.

Bernardo Atxaga (Jose Irazu Garmendia) was born in Asteau, Guipúzcoa, Basque Autonomous Community in Spain, in 1951. He writes novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and children's...

Antoine Audouard was born in Paris in 1956. Audouard spent six years as publishing director of Laffont-Fixot. His novel Farewell, My Only One was published in English in 2004, shortlisted for...

Martin Auer was born in 1951 in Vienna. He studied German and History but never completed his degree; he worked as an actor, a singer-songwriter, a journalist and a magician before publishing...

David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer. He has contributed to The Nation, Slate, n+1, the Times Literary Supplement, Triple Canopy, Bookforum, and elsewhere. He lives in New York and...

María Auxiliadora Álvarez (Caracas, 1956) is a poet and scholar. Her poems are born in that tenuous frontier between body and experience, memory and desire, violence and humility....

Shushan Avagyan (b. 1976) is the author of the novel Girk-Anvernagir (Book, Untitled, 2006) and Zarubyani Kanayq (Zarubyan's Women, 2014). She has translated several books into English,...

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...

Writer. Cholo. Immigrant. Lived in Peru most of his life until he moved to Maine in 2014, where he worked as a cook and now works as an interpreter. He has published three nonfiction...

Jūra Avižienis has been translating Lithuanian literature into English since 1990, when her first translations appeared in Violeta Kelertas’s anthology ­Come Into My Time:...

Yoav Avni was born in Israel in 1969 and lives in Tel Aviv.  His first book, a collection of short stories entitled Those Strange Americans, was published in 1995 by Tamuz Publishing...

Linnea Axelsson was born in the province of North Bothnia in Sweden, and now lives in Stockholm. She studied humanities at Umeå University, where she earned her PhD in art...

Gennady Aygi is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost contemporary poets. His work has been translated into some twenty languages, and he has been nominated several times for the...

François Ayroles was born in Paris in 1969 and lives and works in Bordeaux. After earning his BA, he spent a year in the college of art history at the Panthéon-Sorbonne and then...

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist and journalist. She has published two novels in Arabic: Sariq al-Nawm (The Sleep Thief, 2011) and Sifr al-Ikhtifaa (The Book of Disappearance, 2014),...

Estevão Azevedo was born in Natal (Rio Grande do Norte) and lives in São Paulo. An editor, he received a graduate degree in Brazilian literature from the University of São...

Lucas Aznar Miles is a literary translator based in Barcelona.

Clare Azzopardi (1977) writes for both adults and children. She lectures in Maltese Literature at the University of Malta Junior College and for the past several years has been an active member...