Authors/Contributors

Naomi Jackson is the author of The Star Side of Bird Hill. Star Side was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, longlisted for the National Book Critics...

Noemi Jaffe is an award-winning Brazilian writer whose works have been translated into nearly a dozen languages. After working as a teacher of Brazilian literature for more than twenty years and...

Maya Jaggi, WWB Critic at Large, is an award-winning critic, cultural journalist, and artistic director whose writing on global literature and art appears in the Financial Times, New York Review...

Wojciech Jagielski recently left Poland's leading independent daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, after twenty-one years and has returned to the Polish Press Agency (PAP) where he began his career as a...

Muhammad Husain Jah (?–1891–93?) was one of Urdu's greatest prose stylists and an accomplished poet. His father, Syed Ghulam Husain, was a rammal or diviner. Hardly any...

Born in London to British parents and raised in Italy, Sarah Jane Webb grew up bilingual in a house full of books. From her family she inherited a passion for reading and writing. After...

Zoran Janjanin was born in Karlovac, Croatia, in 1980. He published a novel, Hazmat, and two collections of stories, Zašto očajavati? (Why Despair?) and Crno na crno (Black on...

Jeroen Janssen has been a postman, teacher, driver, gardener, and library assistant and has worked with psychiatric patients. He has always had a great passion for drawing, but did not start...

Grzegorz Janusz and Krystof Gawronkiewicz are the writer and artist of the multivolume Adventures of Otto and Watson. The draft version of the first volume, Essence, won the first European Comic...

David Jaomanoro (1953–2014) was a master poet, playwright, and fiction writer. Following studies in France, he taught literature at the University of Antsiranana before moving to Mayotte,...

Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from the Arabic, whose work includes Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue, Rania Mamoun’s Thirteen Months of Sunrise, and Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail....

Vinicius Jatobá was born in Rio de Janeiro. He has written criticism for leading Brazilian newspapers, including O Estado de S. Paulo and O Globo, and for magazines such as Carta Capital...

Jude Jayaprekash is a scriptwriter and lyricist. He is the Associate Creative Director at Mullenlowe Pvt. Ltd. He has worked in advertising for more than thirteen years. He describes himself as a...

Hama Jaza (1949–2010) was a famous Kurdish singer and lyricist from Iraqi Kurdistan. He became famous in the 1970s for his patriotic songs that supported the Kurdish...

Laura Jean McKay is the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc. 2013), a short story collection that explores the electric zone where local and foreign lives meet. Holiday in...

Elfriede Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna, where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. The leading Austrian writer of her generation, she received the Heinrich...

A Moroccan author writing in French, Tahar Ben Jelloun was born in 1944 in Fez and immigrated to France in 1961. He has published numerous novels, collections of poetry, and essays. He won the...

Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a journalist, writer, and translator from the Danish. She previously served as editor in chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and as blog...

Duncan Jepson is an award-winning director, writer, and producer of five feature films, including Hope Without Future? (2009) and Follow Your Heart: China’s New Youth Movement (2007). He has...

Miljenko Jergovic was born in Sarajevo in 1966. A poet and journalist, he writes for the daily Oslobodjenje newspaper. In addition to Sarajevo Marlboro, he has written another collection of...

Hwang Ji-woo was born in 1952, during the Korean War, in the southern port town Haenam, and studied aesthetics and philosophy at college in the early 1970s, during which he was arrested and...

Contemporary Chinese poet, essayist, literary critic, novelist, editor, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and university professor Yu Jian (1954— ) was born and raised in Kunming, Yunnan...

Born in Anhui Province in 1967, Yang Jian worked as a factory laborer for thirteen years before writing poetry during the mid-eighties. Recognized as one of the greatest living Chinese poets,...

Chenxin Jiang studied literature at Princeton University. She received a 2011 PEN Translation Fund grant, as well as the 2011 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation, an award given each year to one...

Ba Jin was born in 1904 in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan, China. His real name is Li Yaotang. In 1927 he moved to France and wrote his first novel, Destruction (1929). He has lived in Shanghai,...

Jang Jin-sung defected in 2004. He was once a state poet under North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il.

Korean writer Choi Jin-young marked her literary debut by winning the 2006 Silcheon Munhak New Writer’s Award. Her works include the novels The Name of the Girl Who Brushed Past...

Lázaro Márquez Joaquín lives in Chenanástico, Paracho, Michoacán.

Gvantsa Jobava, born in 1986 in Tbilisi, is the current chairperson of the Georgian Publishers and Booksellers Association and the head of the publishing program for Georgia’s activities as...

Matti Yrjänä Joensuu is a serial novelist and a criminal investigator for Helsinki PD. Two of his novels have been shortlisted for Finland's major literary award, the Finlandia...

Nenad Joldeski was born in 1986 in Struga, Macedonia. He is the author of two collections of short stories. In 2016 he received the European Union Prize for Literature. His stories have...

Since 2002, Sam Jones has provided Chicago readers with news on local literary events and occasional observations on books new and old through his literary blog, Golden Rule Jones. In 2006 he...

Lee Jong San was born in 1988 and debuted in 2012 with the first ever Munhakdongne College Prize with her story “Goodbye, Elephant.” She has published the novels A Lazy...

Lieve Joris has published widely acclaimed books on the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Her translated work includes Back to the Congo, The Gates of Damascus, and Mali Blues. Her latest book,...

Fady Joudah's first book of poetry, The Earth in the Attic, received the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 2007. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish's The Butterfly's Burden was...

Jacques Jouet is a poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, and artist. He joined the Oulipo in 1983. The most recent titles in his estimable bibliography are the novel Un dernier mensonge and the...

Biljana Jovanović (1953–96) was a Serbian intellectual who wrote in almost all major genres; she published poetry, three novels, four plays, and a number of nonfiction pieces, mostly...

Paulo Polzonoff Jr. is a São Paulo-based writer and critic and author, most recently, of A Face Oculta de Novo York, a book of essays about New York City.

Laia Jufresa grew up in the cloud forest of Veracruz, Mexico, where water came from a well and electricity had to be stolen from the nearby highway, and spent her adolescence in Paris. Aged 18 she...

Carolyn Jung is an award-winning food and wine writer. She is the recipient of a James Beard award for feature writing about restaurants/chefs, a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism...

Ha-yun Jung is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, the Threepenny Review, the New York Times, and Best New American Voices...

Oh Jung-hee has been publishing short stories for four decades and is widely recognized as a master of the form in Korea. She is the recipient of the Dongin Literature Award and the Yi Sang...

Hans Jürgen Balmes studied Comparative Literature in Bonn, published commentaries on German Romantic poets, works as Editorial Director at S. Fischer in Frankfurt, is co-editor of the...

Etik Juwita was born in Blitar (East Java) in 1982 and works as a housemaid in Hong Kong. Several of her stories have appeared in national publications and in Indonesian-language publications in...