was born in 1937 in Amsterdam. In 1971, he moved to Achterhoek, a quiet, wooded region in the east of the Netherlands where many of his animal stories are set.

In the 1980s, Snijders began writing newspaper columns, and in 2006, his first collection of zkv's ("zeer korte verhalen" or "very short stories"—a term he invented) was published by AFdH Uitgevers, bringing the writer quickly to public attention. Several collections followed, including the volume from which the present stories are taken, De Mol en andere dierenzkv's (The Mole and Other Very Short Animal Stories, AFdH, 2009).

In November 2010, Snijders was awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize, one of the three most important literary prizes in Holland, in recognition of his work as a whole and especially his zkv's. Snijders has by now written approximately 1,500 zkv's.

was born on a night bus traveling north via Budapest. This is his first published story, an adapted excerpt from his novel in progress.

is a contributing editor at Asymptote. He was born in Karachi in 1955 and has lived in London since the '70s. A graduate of SOAS, he has been publishing fiction and criticism since the mid-1980s. He is the author of five collections of short fiction, including Insomnia (2007), and two novels, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and The Cloud Messenger (2011). He has also edited an anthology of writing from Pakistan called Kahani (2005). His first selection of an essay and four fictions in Urdu, from which this story is taken, will appear in the journal Dunyazad (Karachi) later this year. He is Professorial Writing Fellow at Southampton University.

is an 9th-century Alvar saint of South India, who is credited with the great Tamil works, Tiruppavai and Nacciyar Tirumoli, which are still recited today. Eschewing earthly marriage, Aandaal "married" Vishnu, both spiritually and physically, and is considered an incarnation of the divine in many parts of South India, especially in Tamil Nadu.

was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1973. He is the first Moroccan and Arab writer to publicly declare his homosexuality. The French Éditions du Seuil has published five of his books, including L'armée du salut (translated into English by Semiotext(e) in 2009), Une mélancolie arabe (translated into English by Semiotext(e) in 2012), and Lettres à un jeune marocain. His novel Le jour du Roi was awarded the prestigious French Prix de Flore in 2010. His new novel, Infidèles, will come out in France and Morocco at the end of August 2012. His work has been translated into several languages. He has also appeared in Rémi Lange's film The Road to Love (2001).

is a prize-winning writer from Djibouti whose work has been translated into a multitude of languages. These poems come from Les nomades, mes frères, vont boire à la grande ourse (The Nomads, My Brothers, Will Drink from the Big Dipper), his only collection of poetry. Muslim by birth, Waberi writes about nomadic life, colonial and postcolonial hardships, exile, Jewish writers, the Arabic language, and Djibouti's harsh climate. Most importantly, these poems, like his novels, short stories, and essays, carry the important message of tolerance. He is an assistant professor of francophone literature at George Washington University.

(1936—1995) was a Mexican poet from the northern state of Sonora. His books include Digo lo que amo (I Say What I Love, 1976), Poesida (1996), and Navegación en Yoremito (Navigation in Yoremito, 2005).

writes poems and theatre plays. Her first book, poezia-papusa (The Barbie Poem, Cartea Româneasca, 1997), was awarded the Bucharest Writers Association Guild Prize. Her second book, Stare nediferentiată (An Undifferentiated State, Brumar Publishing House, 2006), was distinguished with the Tomis Award. She lives in New York, where she practices Oriental Medicine.

(Ali Ahmad Said, b. 1930) is one of the leading literary figures of the Arab world. The Syrian poet-critic is the author of multiple diwans of poetry. In the 1950s, Adonis cofounded the influential journal al-Shi'r, which called for experimentation in form and a fundamental, though negotiated, break with the 1,500-year-old Arabic poetic tradition. Adonis is arguably as important as a critic and essayist—and his writings have sparked wide and fiery debate among intellectuals. This is the lead essay of one of Adonis's most important essay collections, Time of Poetry, originally published in 1982. While Adonis's place in the field of Arabic letters is hotly contested—he has many detractors—no one would doubt the brilliance and originality of his thought and the impact it has had on the modern period. Much of his poetry, seminal to the emergence of modernism in Arabic, has now been translated. His criticism, which is arguably more important, deserves more attention and presence in English.

is a contributing editor at Asymptote. His translations include the long poem cycle Alma Venus by Pere Gimferrer and Büchner-prize–winning novelist Josef Winkler's Natura Morta and When the Time Comes. His essays, translations, and short fiction have been published in numerous print and online journals, including McSweeney's, 3:AM, and Words Without Borders. He lives with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.

(b. 1946) holds a unique place among contemporary poets of the Urdu language as a master of both the classical and modern Urdu poetic forms. The poems in his recently published collection, Rococo and Other Worlds (Wesleyan University Press Poetry Series, 2010), explore the mythology and historical realities of South Asia and the Middle East; their bold imagery creates narratives of voluptuous perfection, which remain inseparable from the political realities that Syed witnessed as a young observer of the violent separation of East Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 and of the Lebanese civil war in 1976. He has translated works by a number of Eastern European poets, including Miroslav Holub (Czech), Yehuda Amichai (Hebrew), Dunya Mikhail (Arabic), Tadeusz Borowski (Polish), Zbigniew Herbert (Polish), Jan Prokop (Polish), Tadeusz Rozewicz (Polish), Wisława Szymborska (Polish), Aleksander Wat (Polish), Marin Sorescu (Romanian), Osip Mandelstam (Russian), Orhan Veli (Turkish), as well as Gabriel García Márquez, Jean Genet, William Saroyan, and Jonathan Treitel. His website can be found here.

is an established Israeli poet who has won an array of prizes, including the Yehuda Amichai Prize, the Prime Minister's Prize, and the coveted Dolitzky Prize. The daughter of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, Mishol was born in Transylvania, Romania, in 1946 and emigrated to Israel at an early age. Her work has been translated into a number of languages and she has published more than a dozen books of poetry in Hebrew. Look There was published in English by Graywolf Press. Agi Mishol directs the Helicon School of Poetry in Tel Aviv. She recently appeared on Transatlantic Poetry with Marie Howe and is the recipient of the 2014 LericiPea Poetry Prize.

is a writer, poet, publisher, and translator with seventeen publications to date. He lives and works in the Faroe Islands.

was an African-Martinican francophone poet, author, and politician. He was one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature.

(1878-1942), poet and feminist, is considered one of the most important poets in Japanese modern literature. When her first book of poems, Midare Gami, was published in 1901, it met with controversy for pushing the traditional tanka form—which often deals with interiority—by adding exteriority to it. In this book love is not just an emotion, but something that must be experienced physically. The raw emotionality and sexual imagery of these poems caused unease among the still conservative and male-dominant Meiji poetry critics. She also lived an unconventional life for a woman of that period: she eloped with a married man, bore thirteen children (of which eleven lived), became a breadwinner, started a progressive school, and was a proponent of woman's independence, all while having a prolific writing career, producing over 30,000 poems and eleven books of prose.

(b. 1959 in Sichuan Province) is a Chinese poet and novelist of Rgyalrong Tibetan descent. He was a onetime editor of Science Fiction World. His Red Poppies: A Novel of Tibet (2002) has been translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, and his novel King Gesar, also translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, will follow in August 2013 in Canongate Books' Myths series.

was born in Switzerland in 1969, the offspring of a Sephardic family newly exiled from Alexandria. He grew up speaking French and German, and then switched to English in his teens, the language he writes in today. He now lives in London, and has written ten books, including How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Art of Travel. Keen to explore the notion of relevance in education, he started The School of Life and an architectural organization called Living Architecture.

is the author of numerous works of fiction and is one of the most important contemporary figures writing in Cuba today. He received the Ernest Hemingway award in 1998, as well as many other accolades in the Spanish-language literary world.

is the author of books of fiction and essays, which have been translated into many languages, although only two of his novels have been translated to English. He is best known for a quintet of novels, which take place in the Moroccan city of Mogador, and explore the nature of desire: Los nombres del aire (1987), En los labios del agua (1996), Los jardines secretos de Mogador (2001), Nueve veces el asombro: Nueve veces nueve cosas que dicen de Mogador (2005) and La mano del fuego (2007). Since 1988, Alberto Ruy-Sánchez has been the Editor-in-Chief of Latin America's premier editorial house, Artes de México, which has received more than 100 international awards. In 2000, he was decorated by the French Government as Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, in addition to many other prestigious honors. For more information, visit the author's website here.

is one of the earliest recorded representatives of the Greek lyric poets. Tradition holds that he was a Spartan slave, freed because of his skill in composing choral poems.

(Xalapa, Veracruz, México, 1983) has a degree in Theatre from the Universidad Veracruzana, where he is currently a professor of playwriting. He was a finalist in 2005 and 2008 for the National Playwriting Prize: Gerardo Mancebo del Castillo for his plays Un torso, mierda y el secreto del carnicero, and Riñón de cerdo para el desconsuelo. In 2008, he received the National Playwriting Prize: Emilio Carballido for his play Más pequeños que el Guggenheim. In 2009, he won the National Playwriting Prize: Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda for his play Fractales. And in 2011, his play El amor de las luciérnagas was awarded INBA's National Playwriting Prize.

He has been awarded grants from the Fund for Arts and Culture of the State of Veracruz; from FONCA's Young Creators program; from the Antonio Gala Foundation in Spain; from the Lark Play Development Center in New York; and currently, from Mexico's National Council on Science and Technology.

He is the artistic director of the theater company Los Guggenheim.

lives in Santiago de Chile, where he was born in 1975. He has published the poetry collections Bahía Inútil (1998) and Mudanza (2003); the essay collection No leer (2010); and the novels Bonsái (2006), La vida privada de los árboles (2007), and Formas de volver a casa (2011). Melville House published Bonsái in English in 2008, translated by Carolina de Robertis. The next year, The Private Life of Trees appeared in the magazine Open Letter, translated by Megan McDowell, who will also translate Ways of Going Home, a novel that will be published in the winter of 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and by Granta Books in the UK.

is the author of two collections of poems in Russian: Darkness Is White (Argo-Risk Press, Moscow, 2009) and Poems (New Literature Observer Press, Moscow, 2011). In 2011, he was short-listed for the Andrey Bely Prize and The Russian Debut Prize. His first book of poems translated into English, Live by Fire, was published by Cold Hub Press in 2011, and translations have also appeared in World Literature Today, Cyphers, The St. Petersburg Review, The Ryga Journal, SUSS, Words without Borders, and elsewhere. Porvin won the Debut Prize for Poetry in 2012.

lives in Latvia and is the author of eleven plays, which have been staged in the UK, Belarus, Latvia, Russia, Ukraine, and Sweden. Awards include The Grand Prize in the Belarus Free Theatre's International Contemporary Drama Competition for Halt; the Russian "Honour, Duty and Virtue" prize for Colonel Pilate; the International Drama Competition at Badenweiler, Germany, for Mister; the Russia-based Eurasia International Drama Competition for Colonel Pilate and Strana screenplay competition for Halt and White Raincoat. Recent play productions include Remembrance Day (The Royal Court Theatre; nominated for Evening Standard Award for Best Play); Tango with Strok (The Mikhail Chekhov Russian Drama Theatre, Riga); Halt (The Mikhail Chekhov Russian Drama Theatre, Riga; Slonim Drama Theatre, Belarus; Sacvoyge Theatre, Kiev; New Riga Theatre); and Colonel Pilate (Dailes Theatre, Riga). Several of his plays have been presented at the Ljubimovka Drama Festival in Moscow, the Omsk International Drama Lab, and the Prem'yėra.txt festival. Scherbak represented the Baltic States in the Eurepica: Challenge project at the Belarus Free Theatre and Manteatern, Lund (Sweden, 2009; Italy, 2010; Poland, 2011; UK, 2011) with his play The Details by Letter.

is an Editor-at-large at Asymptote. His poems have recently appeared in Colorado, Global City, Green Mountains, and North American reviews, Drunken Boat, Hanging Loose, McSweeney's, Redactions, Tar River Poetry, and 32 Poems. His translations from the Russian can be found in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry, Cimarron Review, Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, PEN America, Brooklyn Rail InTranslation, The Manhattan, and St. Ann's reviews. He was born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine, and lives in New York City.

has published eight books of poetry and twelve books of essays in Slovenian. His books have appeared in English, Japanese, German, Croatian, Serbian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Spanish, Slovak, Finnish, Lithuanian, and Italian translation. Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems appeared from Persea Books in 2010. He has won the Preseren Foundation Prize (Slovenian National Book Award), the Miriam Lindberg Israel Poetry for Peace Prize, the Chiqyu Poetry Prize in Japan, and the Jenko Prize. Debeljak teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

has published six books of poetry, a novel, and two books of essays in Slovenian. He received the 1998 Veronika Prize for the best Slovenian poetry volume of the year, the 1999 Petrarch Prize for young European authors, and the 2007 Rožančeva Award for the best book of essays written in Slovenian. His work has been translated into fourteen languages, including German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. He is a founding editor of the Beletrina publishing house, and he founded the Medana Days of Poetry and Wine festival. The Book of Things, a volume of poetry translated by Brian Henry, appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 as a Lannan Foundation selection and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award.

is the author of seven collections of poetry, the most recent being Basta (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009) and Maaari: Mga Bago at Piling Tula (University of the Philippines Press, 2004). He has won the Philippines Free Press Literary Award and has twice received the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award (for Morpo in 2001 and Samsara in 2002). He teaches at the Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University.

is an Iraqi poet whose collection of poetry Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation is reviewed in the January 2012 issue.

(b. 1985) is a writer and visual artist; she graduated from the Danish Academy of Creative Writing (Forfatterskolen) in 2009 and is currently studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She has published six hybrid books at major and minor Danish publishing houses, including Gyldendal and Distribution After Hand. Her first book has been translated and published in Norwegian, and a Swedish translation of Recollection (from 2012) is on its way. Recollection is her third book, the story of two lovers separated by a serious illness, and a collection of texts and images concerning collections (of minerals, memories, body parts, cells), dispersion, and entropy. Paul Russell Garrett has just finished translating the full copy of Recollection into English and it is now ready for publication. Her website can be viewed here.

is the fiction editor of Esquire (Singapore), editor of creative non-fiction magazine POSKOD.SG, and co-editor of literary journal Ceriph. She was the 2013 Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She spearheaded and edited Eastern Heathens (Ethos Books) with Ng Yi-Sheng, an anthology subverting Asian folklore, and first collection of short stories, Ministry of Moral Panic (Epigram), was launched at the Singapore Writers Festival.

is the author of more than twenty novels. Her books have been translated into more than fifteen different languages and have been awarded the French Academy's 1999 Grand Prix for the Novel, the René-Fallet prize, the Alain-Fournier prize, and the Grand Prix Giono in 2008. Nothomb lives in Paris and Brussels.

is the author of The Present Tense of the World: Poems 2000–2009, reviewed by Aditi Machado in the July 2012 issue.

is a Serbian poet who has published seven collections of poetry. Her most recent book is Meteoric Debris. She has won many awards for her work both in Serbia and Germany. She was a featured reader in Southbank Centre's Poetry Parnassus in 2012. She has read her poetry throughout Europe and Latin America.

(582 BCE–485 BCE) was a Greek lyric poet from the city of Teos.

was born in Budapest on 18 July 1952. He started working life as a dramaturg in the provincial city of Kecskemét (1976–1978) before taking similar posts in Budapest at the People's Theatre in (1978–1980), the National Theatre (1980–1984), the New Theatre and Chamber Theatre (1995–1997). Apart from writing several plays for theatre and screenplays, he has also had considerable success as a translator from English (for example, Shakespeare's King Lear, Marlowe's Edward II, and several plays by Joe Orton), German (Kleist's letters, Wedekind's Lulu, Musil novellas), and French (Jean Genet). As a writer, he wrote his first novel, Aki nincs ((The One) Who Is Not), in 1999, followed by Zehuze in 2007.

(1899–1951) began publishing poems and articles in 1918, while studying engineering. Between 1927 and 1932 he wrote his most politically controversial works, some of them first published in the Soviet Union only in the late 1980s. Other stories were published but subjected to vicious criticism. During the thirties Platonov made several public confessions of error, but went on writing stories only marginally more acceptable to the authorities. From September 1942, after being recommended to the chief editor of Red Star by his friend Vasily Grossman, Platonov worked as a war correspondent and managed to publish several volumes of stories; after the war, however, he was again almost unable to publish. He died in 1951, of tuberculosis caught from his son. Happy Moscow, one of his finest short novels, was first published in 1991. A complete text of Soul was first published only in 1999; letters, notebook entries and unfinished stories continue to appear.

has published her short stories and prose poems online at Black Ice, Big Bridge, Minnetonka Review, Mad Hatters' Review and MHR blog, Istanbul Literary Review, Metazen, Blip, Wigleaf, Big City Lit, fwriction : review, Whale Sound, Wordgathering, Thrice Fiction, Ragazine, THIS Literary Magazine, and Fictionaut. She is the author of four short collections, including Country Without a Name (Argotist Ebooks, 2011), twenty-four stories and prose poems, and XAM: Paragraph Series (Xexoxial Editions, 2005).

lives in the United States with Woodrow, his pet ball python. His stories have been published by New York Tyrant, Black Warrior Review, Parcel, and other publications. He blogs here.

received his Ph.D. from Tsing Hua University, where he teaches at the rank of Associate Professor in the Institute of Taiwan Literature. A Chiayi native, he has written or edited several Chinese language volumes: Lai Ho's Literature and Thought, Taiwan Writers in the Japanese Era, A Cursed Literature: Essays on Taiwan Literature from 1945 to 1949, Radical Love: Sung Tselai's Fiction, and Taiwan's Literary Historiography.

was born in Amelia, a town in the central Italian region of Umbria; scholarly estimates place his birth in 1449. Beginning in his early twenties, Geraldini began writing and traveling extensively. Spain became his second home. He received the poet's crown and was appointed as Spain's ambassador to Florence by Ferdinand and Isabella. He used his political influence to advocate for the Spanish support of Christopher Columbus's expenditures until his own death in 1489. Geraldini's eclogues are considered to be his most prominent poetic work. Though most classical eclogues focus on pastoral imagery, Geraldini's verses are concerned with the life of Christ and were intended to be used as instructional material in Christian-based curricula. Heavily interested in how culture and geography act as our collective contextual framework and as the medium through which we relate, many of Geraldini's other works are individually dedicated to Italian intellectuals of his time.

was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1974. A globetrotter, he has lived in Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and is currently based in Palestine-Israel. He devotes part of his time to writing non-fiction about his home country, Colombia, as well as the Middle East, and was granted the Colombian National Journalism Award in 2005. He has published two short story collections, Trece circos comunes (Thirteen Ordinary Circuses, 1999) and De ciertos animals tristes (Of Certain Sad Animals, 2000), as well as other stories which have appeared in international literary magazines and more than twenty-five anthologies. Ungar has also tried his hand at longer narrative forms: his novel Zanahorias voladoras (Flying Carrots) was published in 2004, followed by Tres ataúdes blancos (Three White Coffins), which won the Herralde Prize in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Rómulo Gallegos Award in 2011.

was born in 1983 in Shiraz. He started writing poetry at the age of fifteen. His first book, Fury, was published in an electronic format in 2007. His second book, The Book of the Blood, was planned to be published in 2010, but it failed to obtain a publication license. As a result it was published as an e-book in the following year. He publishes some of his poems on his weblog. He edits a website dedicated to contemporary Persian poetry.

(c. 680 BCE–c. 645 BCE) was a professional mercenary and poet from the island of Paros.

(b. 1958) has published several books of poetry, most recently La lampe allumée si souvent dans l'ombre (José Corti, 2013), Nous nous attendons (Le Castor Astral, 2012), and La terre voudrait recommencer (Flammarion, 2010). "Paradise" is from Les compagnies silencieuses (Flammarion, 2001).

(b. 1971) is a novelist and reporter. His most recent novel in English is The Jewish Messiah. He lives and works in New York. Find his blog here.

(1907–1989) is one of the great Russian poets of the twentieth century. He survived the entire Soviet era—suffering a leg amputation during World War II—by his work as a translator of poetry. His renown grew with the publication of his first book in the 1950s, and again in the 1970s, when his son the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky used readings of his father's poems in his films The Mirror and Stalker.

奧威尼 卡露斯 was born in 1945 in the West Rukai village of Kochapongane 舊好茶 located in the mountains of south central Taiwan. He is also known by his Chinese name, Qiu Jinshi 邱金士, or just "Father Qiu" 邱爸, and is one of the pioneers of Indigenous literature in Taiwan. Kadresengan did not receive a formal education until he was fourteen years old. At seventeen he left Kochapongane to continue his schooling at a Seventh Day Adventist school in northern Taiwan. After graduation he continued to work in church organizations, eventually becoming an accountant. He married in 1973, later fathering three children. In 1989, he made the radical decision to return to Kochapongane to rebuild the long abandoned village. It was shortly afterward that he began recording the legends and cultural history of his people. He has produced several award-winning books, including Descendants of the Cloud Leopard 雲豹的傳人 (1996), Song of Wild Lilies 野百合之歌 (2001), and Mysterious Disappearance 神秘的消失 (2004). His newest book, Life in the Vortex 渦流中的宿命, slated for publication this year, has also been awarded first prize in the Indigenous Literary Awards for 2011.

was born in Tehran and now lives in San Francisco. Her first collection of poetry, تردید، خود یک باور است (Tardid, khod yek bavar ast/Doubt itself is a belief), was published in Iran by Homa Press (with original cover art by Abbas Kiarostami). Lew Gallery editions recently released Sinusoidal Forms.

has been working as an architect since 1992. Her design, Rumah Kampung, won an award from the Indonesian Association of Architects (Ikatan Arsitek Indonesia) in 2008. Her short story collection, Negeri Para Peri, was published in 2009; one of its stories, "Pada Suatu Hari Ada Ibu dan Radian" ("Once Upon a Time Were Mother and Radian"), was selected as the Kompas Best Short Story (Cerpen Terbaik Kompas) in 2009. Her collection of poems, Perempuan yang Dihapus Namanya (Women Whose Names Were Erased), came out in 2010 and went on to win the Khatulistiwa Literary Award.

spent his childhood in Siberia and emerged as a writer in the youthful literary flowering of Jewish Vilna. As poet and Jew in the Vilna Ghetto, he was transformed into a living remnant of a people near death, writing immortal works and helping to conceal Jewish cultural treasures for later rescue. After the war, he became a prophetic symbol and a cultural-historical institution. He founded the Yiddish literary journal, Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), and in 1985 received the Israel Prize for Yiddish literature. He died in 2010.

was born in Accra, Ghana. She wrote and published her first novel, Harmattan Rain, with a fellowship from Per Ankh Publishers and TrustAfrica. Harmattan Rain was short-listed for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Africa Region. She was educated at Mount Holyoke College, Columbia University, and New York University.

Azra Raza, M.D., was born in Karachi, Pakistan. She is Professor of Medicine and Director of the MDS Center at Columbia University. She is a scientist as well as a practicing oncologist, and has published the results of her laboratory and clinical research in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals (262 full-length papers, 15 book chapters, 535 abstracts, and a book she edited devoted to MDS). She is also the co-author of Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance, a book on the works of the famous Urdu poet. Raza serves on numerous national and international panels as a reviewer, consultant, and adviser. She lives in Manhattan with her daughter Sheherzad.

Sara Suleri Goodyear, Ph.D., was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and has recently retired from Yale University after serving for more than twenty-five years as professor of English. Sara is the highly acclaimed author of Meatless Days, Rhetoric of English India, Boys Will Be Boys, and the co-author of Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance. She currently resides in New Haven, Connecticut.

is a playwright, translator, and jack-of-all-trades, as well as a graduate from the Dramatic Writing Program of the National Theatre School of Canada. Some of his plays, including Rouge Gueule and L'Enclos de l'éléphant, have been presented internationally and translated into several languages. His most recent play, Histoires pour faire des cauchemars, will premiere this spring in Brussels. He is currently at work on a new piece in collaboration with choreographer Frédérick Gravel.

was born on October 25, 1925, into a well-to-do family of traders. She had a happy childhood. She and her little sister were bought up and educated in a loving and supportive atmosphere. This idyllic life came to a sudden end once and for all in 1944. Anima Rerum. The Soul of Things is the story of both the beauty and the horror, but mostly the beauty, even in the midst of the unspeakable. Anima Rerum first appeared in German in 2004 thanks to the Documentation Centre of Stadt Allendorf. It was first published in Hungarian by Tudomány Kiadó in 2005, soon followed by a second edition in 2006. It was published again in Germany this year by Lukas Verlag, Berlin, with the support of the International Auschwitz Committee and the Gedenkstaette Deutcher Widerstand. The book has received critical praise in Die Mahnung and Neues Deutschland, among other publications.

was born on October 25, 1925, into a well-to-do family of traders. She had a happy childhood. She and her little sister were bought up and educated in a loving and supportive atmosphere. This idyllic life came to a sudden end once and for all in 1944. Anima Rerum. The Soul of Things is the story of both the beauty and the horror, but mostly the beauty, even in the midst of the unspeakable. Anima Rerum first appeared in German in 2004 thanks to the Documentation Centre of Stadt Allendorf. It was first published in Hungarian by Tudomány Kiadó in 2005, soon followed by a second edition in 2006. It was published again in Germany this year by Lukas Verlag, Berlin, with the support of the International Auschwitz Committee and the Gedenkstaette Deutcher Widerstand. The book has received critical praise in Die Mahnung and Neues Deutschland, among others.

was born in 1951 and lives in Budapest. He is the author of ten volumes of prose fiction and three books of poems. "On the Road" is from his latest, Where Are You Going Budapest?, a collection of short pieces written for a weekly periodical. He can be contacted here.

is the pen name of the Bengali author, playwright and poet Balai Chand Mukhopadhyay. Born in Bihar, he began writing as a teenager under the pseudonym Banaphool ('wild flower' in Bengali) to hide his work from his tutors. He is most noted for his short vignettes, often just one page long, but his body of work spanned sixty-five years and included numerous poems, short stories, novels, plays and essays. In addition to his literary works, he was also a physician and practised medicine throughout his life. He died in 1979.

is the co-founder and head of Giấy Vụn (Scrap Paper), an independent press in Sài Gòn which publishes poetry and other literature without approval from the government censorship authorities. Giấy Vụn was established in order to publish the works of the Mở miệng (Open Mouth) poetry group, which they call "garbage" or "pavement poetry", not written in proper spelling, using profanities not allowed in print inside Viet Nam, overtly addressing sex and politics. To date, numerous important characters in Sài Gòn's underground poetry circles have published samizdat-style poetry anthologies with Giấy Vụn. In 2004, Chát and co-founder Lý Đợi were jailed for two days for passing out flyers at the site of a poetry reading cancelled by the police. In 2005, the culture department cancelled a performance planned at the Goethe Institute in Hà Nội. In 2011 Chát was awarded the IPA Freedom to Publish Prize 'for his exemplary courage in upholding the freedom to publish.' He was arrested again upon his return to Viet Nam after receiving the award in Buenos Aires and detained for several days. He is currently pursuing a graduate degree at the HCMC University of Law.

(who writes under the pseudonym Zhang Yuan) was born in 1963 in Tainan, Taiwan. She graduated from National Taiwan University, and earned her Master's degree in Performance Studies at New York University. After working as a reporter for World Journal (the largest Chinese newspaper in North America) for many years, she and her family moved to China. She now lives in Shanghai.

Belinda Chang has published five collections of short stories, a collection of essays, and a novel. Winner of several major literary awards in Taiwan, she has had work included in various anthologies and taught at colleges. Her stories appear regularly in literary magazines and newspapers in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and North America.

Recently she was invited to the 11th International Conference on the Short Story in English where she presented her short story, "Cutting in Line," collected in The Border As Fiction: Writers of Taiwan (2010), an anthology featuring the 13 most prominent writers in Taiwan.

(1894–1981) is one of the best known literary figures of Assam who also took part in the struggle against British colonialism and in the fight for Indian independence. His notable literary works include the short story collection, Moromor Kareng; the biographies, Jawaharlal Nehrur Bandi Jiban and Maniram Dewan; and other works including Kangrecar Kanciali Rodat (1959), Dunori, Dakhinpat Sattrat Buranji, and Maniram Dewanor Geet. He was the president of the Assam Sahitya Sabha in 1956. In 1960, he won the Sahitya Akademi award, one of the highest literary recognitions in India, for Kangrecar Kanciali Rodat.

is an Argentine fiction writer. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and an M.F.A. in bilingual creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. She teaches creative writing at the University of Buenos Aires, where she also works as a researcher on the subject of new narratives. In 2006, she was awarded the Clarín Award for Arte menor, her first book. Among the panelists was the Nobel laureate, José Saramago, who praised the novel a "work of major art." That same year, the Argentine Endowment for the Arts awarded her a prize for her collection of short stories, Juegos de playa. She has also published several articles on literary criticism and Argentine culture and media history. In 2012, her second novel, Las poseídas, was awarded the Tusquets Prize, which has established her internationally as one of the most important new voices in Latin American literature.

has published four volumes of the open-ended series A Reading, the most recent of which is A Reading 18-20 (Instance Press, 2006). A Reading: Birds has been published as a chapbook by Little Red Leaves "Textile Series" edited and designed by Dawn Pendergast. Ms. Dahlen has also published widely in numerous periodicals and anthologies and online in Little Red Leaves and Jacket among other sites.

was born on July 27, 1940 in Calcutta, India. In 1947, she moved to Britain with her family at the age of eight and lived in Europe for about three and a half years before returning to India. After getting her B.A from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and her M.A. in English and Ancient Indian Culture from the University of Baroda in 1961, she came to the United States. Having been awarded a scholarship from the University of Iowa, she earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 1963 and her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature in 1969. While studying at the University of Iowa, she met and married a Canadian student from Harvard, Clark Blaise, on September 19, 1963. She has produced two books with her husband, as well as numerous books, essays and short stories of her own. In 1988 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Middleman and Other Stories. Mukherjee's career as a professor and her marriage to Blaise Clark has given her opportunities to teach all over the United States and Canada. Currently she is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

(Mirza Abd al-Qadir) was born to a Muslim family that immigrated to northern India from Central Asia and came of age in a multilingual environment. While his first spoken language was probably Bengali, Bidel soon acquired fluency in Persian and Arabic through his studies. He attained proficiency in Sanskrit and is reported to have memorized the Mahābhārata along with the Qur'an. Bidel, the name the poet chose for himself when he embarked on a literary career, literally means "heartless" in Persian (bi=without; del=heart). Although Bidel was supported by numerous patrons, he maintained his distance from court politics, and strove to carve out a literary aesthetic that was beholden neither to the sectarian religious differences of his milieu nor to its courtly intrigues. The prolific author of four narrative poems (masnavis), Bidel is best remembered as the "national" poet of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, where his poetry is recited by people of all classes to this day.

has published four books of poetry and a book of essays. He teaches at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

(Bucharest, 1958) is one of the best known Romanian poets of recent decades, being at the same time an active and valued theorist in literature, media, art and architecture, as well as a translator of French theory. Defined at first as textualist and metapoet, he refuses postmodern relaxation and blocking, seeking a post-literary expansion of poetry with the performative arts and geopolitical reflection. He has received awards from the Romanian Writers' Union for his volumes The One Meter Side Poem (1996) and The Art of Consuming (1996). His most recent book of poetry is (The Cardboard Poem) Traces of Destruction on Mars (2006), and his most recent essay collections are I, the Artist. Life after Survival. Bar Code for Art's Monstrous Future (2008) and Telepithecapitalism. Media Middle Ages 2005-2009 (2009). At the Venice Biennale 2011, Romania was represented by an exhibition based on his concept, Performing History.

(1914–1997) worked as a railway dispatcher during the Nazi occupation of then Czechoslovakia, a traveling salesman, a steelworker, a recycling mill worker, and a stagehand. His novels were censored under the Communist regime and have since been translated into nearly thirty languages. Milan Kundera once called him "Czechoslovakia's greatest living writer."

was born in 1981 in Riverside, California. Currently a researcher in human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, he has published a number of academic articles and films on issues relating to landscape and place. His most recent production is the film London's Olympic Waterscapes, hosted by the British Library.

is a poet, novelist, memoirist, essayist, visual artist and an outspoken human rights activist. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited around the world. Born in South Africa, he immigrated to Paris in the late '60s and became deeply involved in the anti-Apartheid movement. Breytenbach's works include All One Horse, Mouroir, Notes from the Middle World, A Season in Paradise, Dog Heart, The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, and Voice Over: a nomadic conversation with Mahmoud Darwish. His many honors include the Alan Paton Award for Return to Paradise in 1994 and the prestigious Hertzog Prize for Poetry for Papierblom in 1999 and Die Windvanger (Windcatcher) in 2008.

is a writer interested in humorous fiction, screenplays, and literary essays. You can find links to more of his work at brianlibgober.com.

was raised across three continents and has worked as a journalist in Germany, China, and throughout Southeast Asia. A graduate of Harvard, she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. Her fiction has been published in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2008 and shortlisted in the Best American Short Stories 2004. In addition, her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Short Fiction, X-Connect, the Minnesota Monthly, and the Harvard Advocate. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Time, the Associated Press, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and National Public Radio. She has taught creative writing at the University of Michigan, Carleton College, and the University of Hong Kong. Sonnenberg currently resides in Berlin, where she is the editor of the American Academy's Berlin Journal.

(born in 1901, as Wiktor Bruno Zysman) was among the creators of Polish Futurism, and later, what is retroactively known as Catastrophism. His surviving oeuvre includes poetry, manifestoes, a play, journalism, and several novels and novellas (written at first in Polish, then later in Russian).  When his radical proclamations and disfigurements of the Polish language made life too uncomfortable for him in Poland, he immigrated to France. When the French government had him expelled for writing I Burn Paris, he immigrated to Russia. Following a short-lived period of immediate, mass-scale success in Russia, he was arrested and put to death in 1938.

is Asymptote's drama editor. She received a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre, a 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award and NNPN rolling world premiere for her play GUAPA, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on the Isabel Allende novel. She has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama four times, including in the year 2012 for her play Magnificent Waste. Among her key theatre works: 12 Ophelias, Any Place But Here, Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man's Blues, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), Instructions for Breathing, The Tropic of X, The Way of Water, In the Time of the Butterflies (based on the Julia Alvarez novel), Love in the Time of Cholera (based on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel) and the multimedia collaboration The Booth Variations. Five of her plays radically re-imagining ancient Greek tragedies are published in the September 2012 collection Blasted Heavens (Eyecorner Press, University of Denmark). Her website can be found here.

is an author.

's writing has appeared in Sin Fronteras, The Mom Egg, Sentence, Hip Mama: The Parenting Zine, The Prose Poem Project, Unlikely Stories, Helix, In Posse Review, Poemeleon, Fringe, The Midway, A Cappella Zoo, Feminist Studies, Heresies and elsewhere. She is poetry editor of Talking Writing, and teaches mathematics at Berkeley High School.

has been reviewed in Asymptote.

was born in Coronel Pringles (Argentina) in 1949 and lives in Buenos Aires. In addition to working as a translator, he has published novels, as well as short stories, essays and plays. He is one of the most important authors in contemporary Latin American literature and writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper El País. However, his work has only recently reached a broader and international audience. Aira's literature is known to be something of absolute newness, nouveauté, of constant innovation and inspiration. His novel An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter was selected one of the ten best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times in 2006.

was born in 1892 in Peru. His first book defined literary Indigenism, while his second, Trilce, foreshadowed many innovations of modernism. In 1923, he moved to Paris where he became a prolific journalist. Contra el secreto profesional, written in the 20s, integrates issues of social justice with innovative poetics. During this period he traveled three times to the Soviet Union. He became a member of the Congress of Antifascist Writers in Madrid and visited the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. His later poetry, Poemas humanos, was published a year after his death in 1938.

was born Zipporah Levine in Bobruisk, White Russia in 1888.  She began writing as an adolescent in Russian, and, while studying in Kiev, received encouragement from the Hebrew novelist U.N. Gnessin.  With socialist Shmaye Dropkin, whom she married in 1909, she moved to New York and began writing in Yiddish.  She had six children, five of whom survived, and died in 1956.  In her lifetime, she published many stories and poems in Yiddish journals, and one collection of poems, In Heysn Vint (In the Hot Wind).  Her singular contribution to Yiddish literature was the introduction of a bold literary discourse of sexuality.  Her pastoral poetry is equally marked by ecstatic, despairing, and even grotesque elements.

was born in 1945 in Seoul and graduated from Yonsei University. In 1982, he received the sixth Yi Sang Literature Prize for his story "Deep Blue Night." His work has been translated into Japanese, German, Polish, and French. He died in 2013 of cancer. In 2014 his handprints were memorialized on one of the sidewalks in the Yonsei University neighborhood that he frequented as a university student.

was born in 1971 in Taipei. She studied history at National Taiwan University and the University of Edinburgh before giving up her academic studies to pursue a literary career. She has published two collections of fiction and numerous books of essays, and has been awarded various prizes including Taiwan's United Daily News Prize. She lives in Taipei.

is a New York-based playwright and translator originally from Montreal. Her plays and translations have been presented in theaters across the United States, as well as in Canada, Mexico, and Italy. She has received fellowships from the Lark Play Development Center, the Dramatists Guild, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Banff Playwrights Colony and The Arctic Circle—an expeditionary residency programme bringing together artists, architects, scientists and educators to collectively explore a region of the Arctic. Her translations include plays by Mohamed Kacimi (Algeria), Koffi Kwahulé (Côte d'Ivoire), Étienne Lepage (Québec) and Larry Tremblay (Québec). She is currently working on a six-play cycle which will look at the different facets of the Arctic and investigate how theatre can participate in addressing the many challenges faced by communities on the frontline of climate change. Her website can be found here.

(1920- 1989) was born Phan Ngọc Hoan in Đông Hà, Central Vietnam. He grew up in Quy Nhơn and started writing poetry at an early age. His first collection, Điêu Tàn (In Ruins), was published in 1937. As Neil Jamieson writes, a "bright star on the literary scene in the late 1930s was a young man from central Vietnam who wrote under the pen name Che Lan Vien. His reputation was based primarily on one slender volume of poems, entitled In Ruins, published in 1937 when he was only seventeen years old. Although he was Vietnamese, his poems are mostly about Champa and written from a Cham rather than Vietnamese point of view. It seems, however, that behind his preoccupation with the long-crumpled glories of Champa, deemed worthy of countless centuries of lamentation and regret, lay a view of Vietnam in the 1930s as a decadent and dying society whose true glory was 'in ruins'" (Understanding Vietnam, 163).

(b. 1972, also known as Ta-wei Chi) is one of the most prominent figures in Taipei's queer literary and cultural scene. With BA and MA degrees from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University, and a PhD degree in Comparative Literature at UCLA, he is currently assistant professor of Taiwan Literature at National Chengchi University, Taipei, where he teaches queer theory and disability studies. In addition to being a prolific and critically acclaimed author in Taipei, Chi is a regular contributor to discussions about sexuality and cyberculture, particularly through his columns in Taiwan's major newspapers and magazines. In 1995, his novella The Membranes won the United Daily News Novella Prize. He has also published three collections of stories, a collection of essays, and edited two books of local queer fiction and criticism. His writing styles are diverse, ranging from fantasy and science fiction to politically engaged vignettes about queer life in contemporary Taiwan, and his literary and critical output, ever popular with scholarly readerships, played a key role in defining the direction of Taiwan's new wave of tongzhi/queer intellectual and literary culture. He is writing a history of lesbian and gay literature in Taiwan.

was born in Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria. She has degrees from the University of Nigeria and the KU Leuven and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leiden in Holland. She is the author of three novels, including On Black Sisters Street (Jonathan Cape, 2009, and Random House, 2011) and Night Dancer (Jonathan Cape, 2012). Her writing awards include a Rockefeller Foundation award, a UNESCO-Aschberg Fellowship, and a Ledig House Fellowship in New York. She is the most recent winner of the Nigeria Literature Award, and has been published extensively in literary journals and newspapers. She lives in Turnhout, Belgium.

Hedy Bok (卜婷) is a translator, journalist, and counselor-in-training based in Shanghai. She writes mainly in Chinese and English, and translates both ways. Her nonfiction writings have appeared in Chinese newspapers Mingpao and Xinmin Wanbao. As a media professional, she writes and produces multimedia reportage for South China Morning Post, Post Magazine, and Shanghaiist, and makes regular talk show appearances on Shanghai TV. Having spent her childhood in rural China before moving to the bustling cities of Hong Kong and later, Shanghai, Hedy speaks three Chinese dialects and enjoys finding linguistic similarities and differences between them. She now travels throughout China to interpret for family therapy conferences and counseling workshops.

was born around 1950 and grew up as a mixed-race child in Madagascar. He went on to live in Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, and Chad before moving to Paris. Dumoux's memoir, published in French in 2005, is one of the few available from the island country. He tells his story in the third person, in a series of chapters named after the house he was living in at the time.

holds a PhD in writing and literature. He has published or has forthcoming poetry, essays, translations, interviews and prose fiction in The Paris Review, Esquire, Raritan, Southwest Review, New England Review, Subtropics Antioch Review, Measure, Kyoto Journal, Quick Fiction, and many other magazines. For more than a decade he has lived in Japan, translating the poetry of Chuya Nakahara, and he is the Managing Director of Nuance Partners, a consulting and full-service media company.

is one of Taiwan's most prominent writers. Some of her literary works include "Fin-de-Siècle Splendour" (1990) and Notes of a Desolate Man 荒人手記 (1994). She wrote many of the scripts for the famous Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien. Her screenwriting credits include The Boys from Fengkuei (1983), Dust in the Wind (1986), A City of Sadness (1988), The Puppetmaster (1993), Flower of Shanghai (1998), Millennium Mambo (2001), Three Times (2005), and many more.

was a Japanese early modernist of conflicting impulses: apolitical but iconoclastic; a progressive formalist. Dismissive of institutions, he was a successful auto-didact, and his mastery of waka (formal, 7/5-syllabic verse) combined with a competency in French to provide for his hybrid evolution. His English, however, was inadequate to an academic understanding of English-language poetry. He wrote in the wake of his Meiji-era predecessors, while straining towards those Symbolists and Surrealists he admired and translated, and he is recognized today as one of the most scrupulous pre-war Japanese writers of poems informed by European models, especially the Petrarchan sonnet. Chuya died of tuberculosis, having sold only a thousand books, but the 1967 edition of his collected works spans six volumes, and to date more criticism has been written on him than any other Japanese poet.

(b. 1937), is a Finland-Swedish writer who resides in Esbo (Espoo), part of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area.  Trained as a medical doctor, he specialized in psychiatry. He was elected to the Finnish parliament from 1987-1998 and again in 2007, and he served as minister of culture from 1995-1999.  Andersson made his debut as a poet in 1962 and to date has published twenty-three collections of poetry and seven prose works.  He is also the author of more than twenty plays for the stage or radio, and is well-known as a  jazz pianist. His poems appear in anthologies throughout the world.  Editions of Andersson's selected poems have come out in Finnish, German, and Spanish, as well as one published in 1996, What Became Words, translated by Rika Lesser (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Classics 121), which included poems from his first seventeen books in a bilingual selection, along with an essay introducing his work.  It is now out of print.  Lesser has also translated poems from his later collections, some of which have appeared in Books from Finland.  A few of his poems appear on her website.

studied Modern and Medieval Languages at King's College, Cambridge, and Comparative Education at London University (UK). She currently teaches English and Translation Studies at Rome University, translates, sings in an American folk group, and plays baroque violin.

is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University, the author of a novel, two children's books, four books of nonfiction, and a variety of poetry, plays, short fiction, and essays. His writing has been translated into five languages, including Russian and Chinese. His latest books are Ohio Outback: Learning to Love the Great Black Swamp (The Kent State University Press, 2010) and The Way of Kinship: An Anthology of Native Siberian Literature (The University of Minnesota Press, 2010), which he serves a co-editor/translator with Alexander Vaschenko of Moscow State University.

received her her Masters Degree in Literature and Musical Arts from the Middle Ages to Contemporary Times in 2013 from the University of Parma, with a thesis on "Self-translation, the <> case." Later she published an article entitled "A Case of Intertextu Self-Translation: My Life with Men and Other Animals by Pacheco and Cassi." She has been passionate about theatre since high school, and has been acting for more than ten years in northern Italy. Her fields of research include Italian literature and self-translation, but she is interested in specializing in the area of education.

is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, most of them focused on a single issue or question—formal gardens, illuminated manuscripts, the manufacture of glass, etc. Her most recent book, Gravesend, looks at the cultural history of ghosts, and her current project, Landscapes On A Train, melds photography and text to engage landscape as a fluid medium. She divides her time between Paris and Providence RI, where she teaches in the Literary Arts Department at Brown University.

(1863 - 1933) is considered one of the greatest Greek poets of all time. He described his life in these words: "I am from Constantinople by descent, but I was born in Alexandria—at a house on Seriph Street; I left very young, and spent much of my childhood in England. Subsequently I visited this country as an adult, but for a short period of time. I have also lived in France. During my adolescence I lived over two years in Constantinople. It has been many years since I last visited Greece. My last employment was as a clerk at a government office under the Ministry of Public Works of Egypt. I know English, French, and a little Italian."

was born on 7 June, 1983. In 2012, he earned a Ph.D. in philology with a thesis on the poetry of Marin Sorescu. He has contributed essays and reviews to Echinox, Steaua, Cultura, and Dilemateca. At present, he teaches Romanian language and literature.

(b. 1941, Uruguay) is one of the most celebrated female writers to emerge from the Post-Boom Latin American scene. She has published more than twenty books and has won numerous literary awards, including, most recently, the prestigious Mario Vargas Llosa Prize for her short story collection Habitaciones privadas.

is the author of nine collections of poetry and a book of short stories. His last book was Satori Blues (Softblow Press 2011). He resides in Singapore and is based at The Substation, Singapore's first independent arts centre.

was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania, in 1911. He worked with the Polish Resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II, after which he was stationed in Paris as a cultural attaché from Poland. He defected to France in 1951, and in 1960 he accepted a position at the University of California at Berkeley. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, and was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in 2004.

was born in 1981 in Wroclaw, Poland. She has studied Comparative Literature and Art History, and currently studies creative writing at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as Jahrbuch der Lyrik, freie radikale lyrik, Edit, and Neue Rundschau. She recently published her debut poetry collection, kummerang (kookbooks, Berlin).

was born on Long Island and is the author of several novels, including Martin and John, a collection of short stories, and a family memoir. His short fiction has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Village Voice. He also teaches creative writing and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995. He lives in New York.

was born in Spain. He studied French Literature and Economics, and then moved overseas, from the Balkans to South America. He is passionate about Southern Africa and draws a great deal of inspiration from this part of the world. His work is forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review and A Narrow Fellow.

is an actor, director, writer, and co-artistic director of the Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental in Montreal, where he's created new work since 2003. As an actor, Brière has played a variety of roles in Quebec and overseas. On TV, he has appeared in several series including the popular comedy The Parent Family, for which he was awarded the 2011 Artis Prize for a male lead. In film, he's been seen in Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire and Philippe Falardeau's It's Not Me, I Swear!, both screened at various festivals. He has directed around twenty theatre productions, including Evelyne de la Chenelière's Bashir Lazhar, and LÉO, which was created in Berlin, won three awards at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and has since toured to New York, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and elsewhere. In 2009, American Shot (Le plan américain), which he co-wrote with Chenelière, won the award for best play at the Festival Primeurs in Saarbrücken, Germany.

attended the University of Michigan where he studied acting, directing, playwriting and poetry, winning three Hopwood awards for his writings. Daniel's work as a journalist, poet, and essayist has been published in Die Zeit, The Jewish Quarterly, Spielzeit, Freitext, the poetry monograph "Daylight Savings," and in the book "Dissonant Memories / Fragmented Present." His primary engagement with Yiddish song as a translator, adaptor and performer is to re-contextualize traditional material into contemporary frameworks. His "Alienation Klezmer Band," Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird, has produced four albums for Oriente Musik, winning three prizes from the German Record Critics' Association.

wrote Samko Tále's Cemetery Book reviewed in the Apr 2012 issue.

is the author of American Barricade, which will be published in 2014 by YesYes Books. A chapbook, Family Album, is forthcoming from Poor Claudia this fall. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Tin House, Boston Review, Fence, BOMB, jubilat, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. He writes a monthly column on poetry for The American Reader, hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn, and edits the PEN Poetry Series. Find him here.

is the author of American Barricade, which will be published in 2014 by YesYes Books. A chapbook, Family Album, is forthcoming from Poor Claudia this fall. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Tin House, Boston Review, Fence, BOMB, jubilat, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. He writes a monthly column on poetry for The American Reader, hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn, and edits the PEN Poetry Series. Find him here.

was born in May 1990 in Qamishli, northeastern Syria. He now resides in Berlin where he continues to write political and literary articles for a number of Arab publications.

(1948), a Serbian writer and translator, has published eleven collections of short stories and thirteen novels, including Leeches (novel, 2005) and Shadows (short stories, 2006).

His collection of short stories Description of Death won the Ivo Andrić Award for the best book of short stories published in Yugoslavia in 1982. His novel Bait won the NIN Award for the best novel published in Yugoslavia in 1996, as well as the Balcanica Award and the Berlin Bridge Prize. His books have so far been translated into sixteen languages. Two collections of his short stories and six of his novels have been published in English.

Albahari has translated many books by contemporary British, American, Australian, and Canadian authors into Serbian, including stories and novels by Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, V.S.Naipaul, and Vladimir Nabokov. He has also translated plays by Sam Shepard, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill, and Jason Sherman.

He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts.

In 1994, he moved with his family to Calgary, Alberta; he now divides his time between Calgary and Belgrade.

(1934-1995), poet, painter, filmmaker, playwright and publisher, was born in Tel Aviv, where he lived and worked. A major force in contemporary Hebrew poetry and a leading innovator and artist, Avidan published nineteen books of poetry, as well as plays and children's books. His work has been translated into twenty languages, and collections of his poems have been published in French, Russian and Arabic. His Collected Poems, in four volumes, appeared in Israel in 2009 and 2010. Among his awards: the Abraham Woursell Award from the University of Vienna, the Bialik Award, and the Prime Minister award. Most recently his work has appeared in Drunken Boat, in The Kenyon Review, and in the anthology Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry (SUNY Press).

is an author.

is a translator and researcher based in northern Italy, and was one of the main translators of Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone recently published by FSG and Penguin. He has written a book on Metaphor in Dante (Oxford: Legenda, 2002), plus articles on Petrarch, Tasso and Manzoni among others, as well as Leopardi. Other authors he has translated include Tiziano Terzani, Carlo Cattaneo and Vincenzo Cuoco. He writes what he likes, when he likes, at http://scribblingforfun.wordpress.com/.

is the author of several novels, including The Indian Clerk, The Body of Jonah Boyd and While England Sleeps. A recipient of fellowships from both the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

is the author of twelve books, including Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010), which was named one of the best books of the year by more than thirty publications; The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), a New York Times bestseller; Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Esquire, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader; he's written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.

is a writer, literary scholar, and translator. He is the author of four collections of single-panel cartoons – including Baddies (Melville House 2009) – and his fiction has appeared in Ambit, KGB LitMag, and Atticus Review. For five years he wrote on contemporary art for The Jerusalem Post Magazine and his culture writing has also appeared in The Believer, Forward, and Haaretz. His translations from Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish include Polina Barskova's The Zoo in Winter (Melville House 2011), Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Job"  (The New Yorker, 2012) and Gail Hareven's "Good Girl" (Asymptote 2013). His scholarly articles on Dostoevsky, Camus, and Singer have appeared in Russian Review, French Forum and in a collection titled The Ethics of Literary Communication (Benjamins 2013). He holds a doctorate in literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is on the editorial board of the English Department's Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas.

is unequivocally one of the most significant and highest esteemed contemporary German-language playwrights. The author of nearly 20 plays, multiple radio plays, a libretto and a book of short stories, Loher has been awarded nearly every significant German prize for excellence as a playwright, including the Bertolt Brecht Literature Prize, the Mülheim Drama Prize and the Berlin Literature Prize, some multiple times. With a body of work dating from 1991, Loher's plays are marked by innovative uses and combinations of styles of language, merging the poetic with the pedestrian, the literary and the laconic, utilizing the resulting dissonance to great dramatic effect. While her subject matter ranges from small town life to events torn directly from the pages of international news outlets to historical and literary figures such as Medea and the Red Army Faction, Loher continually explores what it is that creates communities, what it is that creates connections between individuals and how these connections are maintained or severed. Loher's plays have an impact far beyond the boundaries of the German-speaking world; her work has been translated into 28 different languages.

has published five books of poetry, among them Banishment from Paradise (1979, winner of a Writers' Union Debut prize), Boat on the Waves (1987), a volume of selected poems, The Trace of Fire (1999), and Now the Biography of Then (2000). Comănescu's poetry was included in the anthologies Silent Voices and Young Poets from a New Romania (Forest Books), When the Tunnels Meet (Bloodaxe), and Born in Utopia (Talisman House). Poems of hers in Adam J. Sorkin's translations have appeared in Omnibus [U.K.], Visions International, Exquisite Corpse, Puerto del Sol, 91st Meridian, The Connecticut Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine (which nominated one of her poems for a Pushcart Prize), Zoland Poetry, Great River Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Osiris. Comănescu has taken part in the University of Iowa International Writing Program. She lives in Bucharest, where she coordinates a world literature series of Humanitas Publishing House.

has edited more than ten books and co-produced three audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. Trained in book publishing at Stanford, with a theology masters in world religions from Harvard and fine arts masters in creative writing from Notre Dame, Desmond is a recipient of the Tom Howard High Distinction Award, Tupelo Press Poetry Project Honorable Mention, and Singapore Internationale Grant. Desmond also works in clay, his commemorative pieces housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

has edited more than ten books and co-produced three audio books. These span the genres of ethnography, journalism, poetry, and creative nonfiction, several edited pro bono for non-profit organizations. Trained in publishing at Stanford, with a theology masters (world religions) from Harvard and fine arts masters (creative writing) from Notre Dame, he is the recipient of the PEN American Center Shorts Prize, Swale Life Poetry Prize, Cyclamens & Swords Poetry Prize, and Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Prize, among other awards. Desmond is an interdisciplinary artist, also working in clay. His commemorative pieces are housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

(Szabadka/Subotica, now Serbia, 1885 – Budapest, 1936) was Hungary's most original and most stylish interwar writer. Kosztolányi studied at the University of Budapest but left without graduating to go into journalism in 1906. In 1908 he was among the first contributors to the legendary literary journal Nyugat (West) and immediately made his mark as a poet. Turning to fiction from the 1920s, he wrote four novels, three of which are available in English, as well as hundreds of pieces of short prose. The first series of his renowned Kornél Esti (Cornelius Nightly) stories appeared in English earlier this year.

is the author of The Prison of Love, among other works. Virtually nothing is known with certainty of him. The dates commonly given for his birth and death are 1437 and 1498, respectively. It is considered that he studied law, that he was a member of the lower nobility engaged in service to Queen Isabella, and that he fought on the side of the Catholic Monarchs against the army of the Nasrid Dynasty in the Granada War (1482-1492). Of his scant surviving works, The Prison of Love is considered the most important. The first example of the epistolary novel, it was translated into numerous languages shortly after its author's death and achieved international renown.

was born in 1986 in Komsomolsk-on-Amur (Russia) in the family of a military man. He spent his childhood in Russia, Hungary, Belarus. In 2009, he graduated from Khmelnytskyi National University trained as a lecturer of English and Ukrainian languages. During 2008-2010, he had an internship in the Laboratory of Communal Directing of Boris Yukhananov in the School of Dramatic Art Theatre (Moscow). In 2012 and 2013, he participated in the Week of Contemporary Drama Drama Festival (Kiev). Author of three plays: The Murder Scenes (2012) (Short list of Belarus freedom theatre 2014), Lena (2013) (premiered in Cherkassy national theatre in 2014), The Blue Bus (2014). He works as a journalist and writer in Kyiv; speaks Russian, Ukrainian and English.

, born December 24, 1968, in Bucharest, has published five volumes of verse to date, consisting without exception of prose poems ranging from one to twenty-five lines. In the nineties she was a member of the legendary writers' workshop "Litere", associated with Bucharest University, where she studied French language and literature. After a spell on the the teaching staff of Brasov University (Romania), Doina Ioanid has been working, since 2005, as senior editor for The Cultural Observer, a leading Romanian cultural weekly. She goes on frequent reading tours both in Romania and abroad (France, Turkey, Sweden, Holland, Italy, UK).

is Chair of Culture and Media, Eugene Lang College, as well as Associate Professor of Liberal Studies, New School for Social Research in New York City. He has held previous positions at the University of Melbourne, the University of Geneva, and the University of Amsterdam. Topics which inspire him include techno-poetic fancies, unexpected libidinal economies, inter-species epiphanies, and transnational culinary possibilities. He is the co-author of Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object (AUP, 2004), and the sole author of After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion (SUNY, 2002), Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age (Fordham, 2006), and Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (Minnesota, 2011).

was born in Beirut in 1953. A novelist and essayist, for many years she worked as a publisher in Paris, and then in Rome. As a literary critic and political commentator she has been a regular contributor to Le Monde des Livres and Revue d'Études Palestiniennes. In 1991, she commissioned six international photographers including Raymond Depardon, Robert Frank and Josef Koudelka to photograph the destroyed city of Beirut for a book entitled Beirut City-Center. She is the author of several novels notably Pourquoi il fait si sombre? (not yet translated into English) and Kite. Her most recent novel, Kamal Jann, to be published in English translation in 2013, deals with Syria and the Middle East through the story of one ill-fated family. She has published an essay on Jean Genet and conversations with the psychoanalyst André Green, and has written on the works of several photographers. She has also translated two works by Edward Said into French.

is one of the most original voices of contemporary Danish letters. She was born in 1970 in Herning, Denmark and currently lives in Jutland. Nors holds a degree in literature and history from the Aarhus University. In addition to her celebrated short story collection, Karate Chop (Kantslag), she has published one novella and four novels, including the most recent: Minna mangler et øvelokale (Minna Needs Rehearsal Space). Nors's short stories have appeared in countless publications, including Harper's Magazine, Boston Review, AGNI, and Guernica. She is the first Danish writer to ever have a story published in The New Yorker. In 2011, she was awarded the Danish Arts Agency's Three-Year Grant for "her unusual and extraordinary talent." In 2014, her story collection Karate Chop won the prestigious P.O. Enquist Literary Prize.

was born in El Cerro, Montevideo, Uruguay. When he was five, he moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to join his parents, who had sought refuge there a year earlier. Shortly afterward, there was a military coup in Argentina. When the resistance to the military dictatorship began to grow stronger in Uruguay, Candil returned for a time, living just outside Montevideo. Since then he has participated in social movements in Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

is the author of several works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and The Ministry of Pain, and several essay collections, most recently Thank You for Not Reading. In 1991, when war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Ugrešić took a firm anti-nationalistic stand and was proclaimed a "traitor," a "public enemy," and a "witch," and was exposed to harsh and persistent media harassment. As a result, she left Croatia in 1993 and currently lives in Amsterdam.

was born in Dresden in 1962. He studied theater at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin but interrupted his studies to begin working as a poet, essayist, and translator. His first book of poems, Grauzone morgens, was published in 1988 in West Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he traveled throughout Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States. He has held guest professorships at NYU, Dartmouth, the Heinrich-Heine Universität in Düsseldorf, and the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. He is a professor at the European Graduate School and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He has received numerous awards, including the Georg Büchner Prize, and his work has been frequently anthologized and translated into numerous languages. He currently lives in Rome.

is a contributing editor at Asymptote. He was born and raised in Brooklyn. He has published reviews, criticism and essays in The Millions, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and The New York Times.

lives in Barcelona. He published two books of poetry in Spanish before writing Zugzwang (1995), his first work in Catalan and the source of the fiction that appears here. He has continued writing in Catalan, publishing another collection of short fiction, twelve children's books, and four novels. His 2006 novel, La decisió de Brandes (Brandes's Decision), won three Catalan prizes, the Premi Octavi Pelissi, the Premi de la Critica, and the Premi Qwerty. His work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish. English translations of other excerpts from Zugzwang have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Bomb, and World Literature Today.

is one of the most renowned living contemporary Uruguayan poets. He has published a dozen books of poetry and essays, and won the two most important literary awards in his country: the National Prize of Essay (1996 and 2000) and the Municipal Prize of Poetry (1998). His work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Albanian and Croatian. He is included in more than 30 anthologies of Latin American poetry. In 2006 he won the Latino Literary Prize, awarded by the Instituto Hispanoamericano de Escritores, established at CUNY, for his book El cutis patrio (from which the featured poems are taken).

was born in Rivera, Uruguay, in 1952, exiled himself for political reasons, and has lived in Mexico since 1979. He has published sixteen volumes of poetry. His Selected Poems is out from Shearsman (2012) and he is featured in Hotel Lautréamont: Contemporary Uruguayan Poetry, edited by Kent Johnson and Roberto Echevarren (2011). This selection is taken from his book Obvio al desnudo (Nakedly Obvious), written in 2005-6 and published by the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (Monterrey, Mexico) in 2009.

was born 1950 in Ocosingo, State of Chiapas, Mexico. His poetry has been collected in the following volumes: Agua lustral (Holy Water: Poems, 1982-1987, Col. Lecturas Mexicanas, Conaculta, 1994); Oficio: arder (Poet Afire: Poems, 1982-1997, UNAM, 1999); and El ser que somos (Being Who We Are, Col. Antologías, Editorial Renacimiento, Sevilla, 2006). Winner: Mexico City Prize; Aguascalientes National Poetry Award; Carlos Pellicer Prize for published work; Jaime Sabines International Poetry Prize. The Mexican government awarded him the National Forest and Wildlife Merit Prize. In 1998 he received the Chiapas Arts Prize. In 2001 he received the International Latino Arts Award in the United States. He is a member of the National Council of Creative Artists. His poems have been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, Arabic, Galician, Nahuatl, Peninsular Mayan and Esperanto.

(real name 鄭千慈 Zheng Qianci) was born in 1977, Tainan, Taiwan. He studied medicine at Taipei Medical University and obtained an MA in Chinese Literature from Tamkang University. Previously artist-in-residence at National Cheng Kung University and writer-in-residence at Yuan Ze University. The recipient of several literary awards, his works have been selected for anthologies such as Taiwanese Stories 《台灣說故事》(2009) and A Tale of Three Cities: Taipei 《三城記：台北卷》. His first novel Man in the Urn 《甕中人》 (2003) has become part of the contemporary canon. He was nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007, and was named one of Taiwan's ten most promising Taiwanese people. In 2008, he was nominated for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. His novel The Dream Devourer 《噬夢人》 (2010) has topped books.com.tw's Chinese literature list for the past two years, and came in first in Unitas' book picks for the year. It was also shortlisted for various awards. In 2011 he published a collection of poetry entitled Your Light Shines Through My Eyes《你是穿入我瞳孔的光》.

is a playwright whose plays include: Mutis, Stolen Words, Juan Volado, Atrocious Beauties, Free Fall, Connecting People, Turning of the Lamps, and A Lover's Dismantling: Fragments of a Scenic Discourse. The recipient of the Oscar Liera Award (twice) and the National Award for Children's Dramaturgy and multiple FONCA scholarships, her work has been presented at several international festivals, including Mousson d'èté and the Neue Dramatik of the Schaubühne. She has recently participated in workshops at The Royal Court, and at the Lark Play Development Center in New York. Last July, A Lover´s Dismantling... was read at the Goodman Theatre as part of its 5th Biennial Latino Theatre Festival.

was born in Thessaloniki. She studied theater and philosophy at Wesleyan University and screen and theater writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She staged her first plays in New York's Off-Off Broadway scene and returned to Greece in the 90s. Since then her plays have been produced at the National Theater of Greece, the Athens Festival and Delphi among many other theaters. Her work has been translated into Dutch, Swedish, German, French, Italian and English, and performed in the United States, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the United Arab Emirates. She also wrote the screenplay for Lakis Papastathis's award-winning film, The Only Journey of his Life. She teaches theater writing at the National Book Centre of Greece. Her short stories have appeared from Agra in three collections. Tight Belts and Other Skin is the winner of the Ouranis Prize from the Greek Academy of Letters (2012).

(b. 1975) is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker from Helsinki, Finland. Her debut novel, When I Forgot (Tin House, 2009; Että Hän Muistaisi Saman, Avain, 2005), was nominated for the Finlandia Prize in 2005, and was translated into nine languages, making it the most-translated debut novel in Finnish history. The New York Times Book Review praised the novel as "potent, fragile and tender." Her second novel, Kauimpana kuolemasta (Farthest From Death, Avain, 2010), was born in Lusaka, Zambia, where Hirvonen and her husband spent two years. There she volunteered at a foster home for street children and trained young Zambians in filmmaking. Hirvonen's documentary film Paradise—Three Journals in This World (2007), shot in Spain, Morocco and Mali, which deals with African emigration to Europe, won several festival awards. In the film, Spanish tomatoes cultivated by illegal immigrants are used as a metaphor for immigration, human rights and the global economy.

is a young but critically acclaimed Italian poet living in Florence. Her poetry collections include three titles released in the 2000s by the publishing house Einaudi: L'Ospite,  Fiato. Parole per musica, and Nel Bosco. It is from Nel Bosco that the present selection is taken. Elisa has also published translations of American poetry, in particular the anthology Nuovi Poeti Americani (Einaudi, 2006). She is a frequent reader on the international poetry circuit, and maintains a website here.

, one of Sweden's most highly regarded women writers alive today, was born in Stockholm in 1954. She has lived in London and traveled overland through Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to India. For decades a resident of Sweden's remote north (Älvsbyn, Lycksele, Umeå), Rynell now divides her time between Stockholm and Delsbo, a community in Hälsingland, farther south in Norrland. Her writing is lyrical, straightforward or oblique, as need be--not a word is wasted--and has been praised for its emotional intensity, openness and sensuality. She writes of beauty and terror; over time Rynell's tales increasingly cross into borderlands of myth and fable. She made her literary debut with a collection of poetry in 1975. Eleven more books ensued; four are works of fiction, one is nonfiction, and the other seven are poetry, so far. After the sudden death of her 32-year-old husband, Elisabeth Rynell wrote works of poetry and prose that are still widely read and esteemed in her native Sweden. The poetry collection Nattliga samtal (Nocturnal Conversations, 1990) came first; the novel Hohaj was published in 1997. 

was born in the German Eifel in 1938 but moved to the GDR (Halle an der Saale) in 1949. Since 1966 she has had a varied career as a translator, essayist, critic, and—primarily—poet. She has lived mainly in Berlin. Her poetry tends to focus on the concrete, but from an oblique perspective; she often develops complex trains of thought in an equally complex syntax. Her poetry publications include Gänsesommer (2005), Sonanz. 5-Minuten-Notate (2008), Meins (2010), and Das Hündle kam weiter auf drein (2013). Among her many honors and awards are the Peter Huchel Prize (for Kastanienallee, 1988), the Georg Trakl Prize (2012), and the Ernst Jandl Prize (2013). A selection of her prose poems, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop, appeared in 1995 as Mountains in Berlin.

was born in 1899. In 1937, Edna St. Vincent Millay published her translation of his poem "The Arrival (To Garcia Lorca)" in Spain Sings. Since then, little attention has been paid to his work by readers of English. In Spain he is thought to be next to Garcia Lorca with respect to the depth of his song. In the years before the Spanish Civil War, working with Manuel Altolaguirre, Prados established Litoral, a press associated with the work of many authors of the Generation of 1927: Lorca, Cernuda, Aleixandre, to name only a few. During the War, he wrote in popular idioms in order to gain support for the cause of freedom. Prados died in exile in Mexico in 1962. Jardín cerrado (Enclosed Garden) reflects the loss of homeland and a beautiful gentleness of spirit.

(1914-2003) was a poet, visual artist, translator, critic, and Bible scholar. His poems encompass modern and ancient languages, including Milanese, Italian, French, English, Latin, Greek, Sumerian, and Akkadian. Fundamental to his formation were the years he spent in seminary school outside Milan and at the Istituto Biblico in Rome, where he specialized in Ancient Semitic Philology. Throughout his life, he worked on an a-confessional translation of the Hebrew Bible (which remains unpublished today), and wrote extensively on contemporary art and its relation to the visual texts left by prehistoric man. Villa's preoccupation with the origin of language (verbal as well as non-verbal) is the common thread that runs through his diverse artistic and critical endeavors.

divides her time between Berlin and Austin, Texas. She grew up in New Orleans and Mississippi, and moved to Germany on a Fulbright Fellowship. With graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona, she has taught creative writing at various universities and worked in film—notably on the short, Issaquena, and the PBS documentary, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans. Her fiction can be read in Bordercrossing-Berlin, Cutthroat: a Journal of the Arts, the extra room, Oregon Literary Review, and the anthology, Writing as Revision. She is finishing a novel set in Mississippi.

wrote Moscardino reviewed in the Apr 2012 issue.

(Santiago, Chile, 1982) is a poet, editor, lawyer, and MFA candidate in Creative Writing at NYU. He is author of Guía de despacho (2010; winner of the National Young Poet Competition), Rascacielos (Mexico, 2008; Buenos Aires, 2011; winner of the National Book Council Fellowship), and Atar las naves (2003; winner of the Víctor Jara Arts Festival). In addition, he co-translated the anthology Decepciones by Philip Larkin (2013) and co-authored the album Agua en polvo (2012; winner of the Fund for the Promotion of Chilean Music).

was born to Moroccan parents in Oran, Algeria, in 1942, and emigrated to Israel in 1948. At the age of ten he was blinded by a stray bomb he found near his home in Lod, and spent the rest of his childhood in the Jewish Institute for the Blind. He received a B.A. in social work from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an M.A. in psychology from Bar Ilan University. He wrote a weekly column for the Israeli daily Ma'ariv and worked as a social worker and as a psychologist. His first two books, A Moroccan Offering and The Book of Na'na, published in 1976 and 1979 respectively, established him as the founding father of Sephardic poetry in Israel—the first poet to take on the conflict between North African immigrants and the Ashkenazi society, and the first to use Judeo-Arabic dialect in his poetry. He is the recipient of several literary awards, and the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Apyrion, which he founded in 1982. His two subsequent collections are: Timbisert, a Moroccan Bird (2009) and Blindfolded Landscapes (2013). Awards he has received include the Miriam Talpir Prize (1982), the Prime Minister's Prize (1988), the 2014 Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize, and the 2014 Bialik Prize for Poetry.

is the author of the short story collections Coisas do mundo, A palavra nunca, and Antologia pessoal, among others. His translations of the work of Gabriel García Márquez into Portuguese include News of a Kidnapping, Strange Pilgrims (Doce cuentos peregrinos), Living to Tell the Tale, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

was born in Aarau, Switzerland in 1922.  Throughout her career as a writer she published over 24 collections of poetry, 8 prose works, and was awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Conrad-Ferdinand-Meyer-Preis (1961) and the Gottfried-Keller-Preis (1992).  She was the only woman ever to have been awarded Switzerland's highest literary prize, der Grosser Schillerpreis (2005).  She passed away on April 14, 2010. The poems featured here are translated from her very last collection of poems, published in Switzerland, Geheimbrief (Amman Verlag, Zurich, 2009).

was born in 1981 in Örnsköldsvik, Northern Sweden. A researcher of geography at Uppsala University, she has spent the greater part of her childhood summers in the landscape Lindgren's magical realities spring from. Erika is currently writing a book about places of migrant refuge.

was born in 1952 in Zăbrani [Guttenbrunn], Banat, Romania, and has been living in Germany since 1975. He translates from the Romanian and directs the Literaturhaus in Berlin. His awards include the Lyrik-Stipendium Niedersachsen (1997) and the Preis der Stadt Münster für Europäische Poesie (2005). His books of poetry include Steinsuppe (1988), Die Einzahl der Wolken (2003), Rückseite der Gesten (2003), "Bin ganz wie aufgesperrt" (2010), and Neuschnee und Ovomaltine (2010).

is the Israeli author of six story collections, most recently Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. His writing has been published in Harper's, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. Jellyfish, his first movie as a director, won the Camera d'Or prize for best first feature at Cannes in 2007. In 2010, he was named a Chevalier of France's Order of Arts and Letters.

is a Russian-American poet and translator based in New York City and Berlin.

is a major figure in Swahili literature, a pioneering author both of fiction and poetry. Born in 1944 in Ukerewe, Tanzania (then Tanganyika), he came of age in the newly independent nation. Beginning with the publication of his first poetry collection in 1974, he has been centrally responsible for introducing free verse into Swahili: a controversial innovation. As a professor in the Department of African Languages and Literatures at the University of Botswana, he teaches courses in aesthetics, philosophy, and folklore.

is a Maryland-born poet and art critic currently living in Germany. She recently published two books of poetry, Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic (Kore Press) and Drawing Water (Noctuary Press), as well as an art historical catalog essay for the Iceland Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. She lived in Iceland for nine years, and "Vocabulary Landscape" is from a book-length poem exploring how language impacts perception of the landscape.

is a graduate of the MFA program at Penn State where he was a Milton B. Dolinger fellow in writing. He is currently a student in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His poems have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review and are forthcoming in the Crab Orchard Review. His prose has appeared in the Village Voice, the Colorado Review, New Letters and the Green Mountains Review.

is a Canadian actress and writer whose plays have been widely produced in Quebec and translated into several languages. In plays such as Strawberries in January, Henri & Margaux, L'Héritage de Darwin, Bashir Lazhar, and Le plan américain (American Shot, winner of the award for best play at the Festival Primeurs in Saarbrücken, Germany, in 2009), Chenelière carries out a meticulous observation of human nature. In 2006, she won the prestigious Governor General's Literary Award for Désordre public (Public Disorder), and she has since been a finalist for that award for two other plays. Chenelière was discovered by Jean-Pierre Ronfard, founding director of the Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental in Montreal, where she often collaborates with Daniel Brière. She has worked with many directors on stage and in film, and in 2011 she published a novel, La concordance des temps.

was born in Linz, Austria, in 1978, and studied theology, philosophy, and psychology in Vienna. In the 2007-08 season he was writer-in-residence at the Schauspielhaus Wien; in 2010-11 he held the same position, along with that of guest dramaturg, at the Nationaltheater Mannheim. In a 2008 critics' poll for the prominent journal Theater heute, Ewald was named Emerging Dramatist of the Year. He has also won awards from the Kulturkreis der Deutschen Wirtschaft and the city of Vienna, as well as a nomination for the Nestroy Prize (for wohnen. unter glas). The Schauspielhaus Wien productions of his plays hamlet ist tot. keine schwerkraft and faust hat hunger und verschluckt sich an einer grete were both invited to the Mülheimer Theatertage (a prestigious competitive festival). 2010 saw the premiere production of tier. man wird doch bitte unterschicht in Dresden, and in December 2012, Ewald's latest play, räuber. schuldengenital, was staged at the Wiener Akademietheater and directed by the highly regarded Stephan Kimmig.

was born in Mendrisio (Canton Ticino, Switzerland) in 1957 and has double, i.e., Swiss and Italian, citizenship. He teaches Italian literature in Lugano. He has published several collections of poetry, most recently Corpo Stellare (Stellar Body, Marcos y Marcos, Milano, 2010), where these poems appeared. In 2007 he won the Prix Gottfried Keller, a prestigious Swiss literary prize, and in 2009 he was awarded the Premio Dessi. He has published two books of translations of Philippe Jaccottet, and an anthology of contemporary French poetry in translation.

is the recipient of the Griffin Prize for International Poetry in 2013 for his translation of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me. His translations of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry have also won him a Banipal Prize from the UK and a PEN USA award. His first poetry collection won the Yale Series for Younger Poets. Alight is now available from Copper Canyon Press. He is a practicing physician of internal medicine.

was born in Prague in 1961 and grew up in Germany and Iran. He now works as a psychiatrist in Hamburg. Besides Ende des Stadplans (End of the City Map, 2003), his second book, he has published Die Walnußmaske, durch die ich mich träumend aß (The Walnut Mask I Ate Through in a Dream, 1998) and Die grosse Enfernung (The Great Distance, 2008). He has translated the Iranian poet Ahmad Schamlou into German.

(1970–) was born in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He studied veterinary medicine in Zagreb until the outbreak of the Bosnian War. At age twenty-two he voluntarily joined the Bosnian Army and commanded a unit of 130 men as a lieutenant. After the war he studied literature and started to write poetry and short fiction. His 2011 debut novel, Knjiga o Uni (The Book of the Una), won the 2011 Meša Selimović prize (awarded by the Cum Grano Salis Festival in Tuzla, Bosnia) for the best novel published in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Croatia, as well as the 2013 European Union Prize for Literature. His works have been translated into English, German, Bulgarian, and Macedonian. He lives in Sarajevo and writes columns for a local weekly.

was born in Lisbon in 1888. He spent much of his childhood in Durban, South Africa, returning to Lisbon at the age of  seventeen. He earned his living as a writer of foreign correspodence for business firms, as a translator and horoscope seller. Pessoa created a wide array of characters in the theatre of himself (made up of at least seventy two "dramatis personae"), though the three heteronyms for which he is well known are: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. He died in Lisbon in 1935.

was an American author and essayist. She was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia and is best known for her short story collections A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). Her writing frequently examined questions of a theological and ethical nature, and especially her own Catholic faith. Her Complete Stories (1971) won the US National Book Award in 1972. In 1951 she contracted lupus, and died in 1964, at the age of 39, from complications relating to the disease.

is a contemporary poet from Paraty, Brazil, who comes from a family of caiçara fishermen. His debut poetry collection, Zangareio, was published in conjunction with the 2008 OFF FLIP literary festival, an offshoot of FLIP (Paraty International Literary Festival). Araújo has participated in, and helped to organize, OFF FLIP, and has served as an editor for the Jornal de Poesia literary journal. He has also read at the International Literary Festival of Porto de Galinhas-Pernambuco and the International Literature Festival in Havana, Cuba. Zangareio is currently being translated into Spanish by Mexican poet Martha Favila.

(Asymptote's senior editor) is a writer and editor, was born in the Netherlands, and was schooled in the United States. His travel journalism has appeared in The Guardian and National Geographic Traveller, and his music writing at Askmen.com and elsewhere on the Web. He has a serious addiction to buying batches of Amazon Marketplace books and uses this to satisfy his various literary hungers—Virago early feminist classics, YA trilogies, gay fiction, and the 'lyrical essay', among many others. His (non-lit) blog and Twitter feed provide further indications to his splintered attention span.

was born in Taranto, where she currently lives and writes. Her publications include Chernobylove — il giorno dopo il vento (Kimerik, 2010); Dimentico sempre di dare l'acqua ai sogni (Kimerik, 2009); and Niente di personale (Samizdat/Biblioteca Clandestina Errabonda, 2009). In 2008, a grouping of poems, L'Enunciato, was selected for the series, Donne in poesia. She is a coordinator of the literary magazine LibrAria.

(1899–1984 ) was born in Montpellier, France. His best-known work in English translation is Le parti pris des choses (Gallimard, 1942).

was born in 1930 in Alicante, Spain, and fled with her family to France at the end of the Spanish Civil War, where they lived in political exile.  When the Germans invaded Paris in 1942, her family was forced to return to Spain, where her father, painter Lorenzo Aguirre, was subsequently murdered by Francisco Franco's regime.  Aguirre published Ítaca (1972), the only book currently available in English (Ithaca [2004]), when she was 42 years old. Her work has garnered much critical success, winning the Leopoldo Panero, Premio Ciudad de Irún, and Premio Galliana, among other literary prizes.  Aguirre is married to the poet Félix Grande and is the mother of poet Guadalupe Grande.

was an Argentine poet and journalist born in 1930 in the province of Santa Fe. His short adult life was spent, mainly in Buenos Aires, writing and militating against the dictatorial Argentine government. For Urondo, social and political experience was inseparable from poetry; his activism pervaded his writing, even when towards the end of his life he was forced to live clandestinely. Like other contemporary Latin American poets, including Juan Gelman, Urondo pushed literary conventions to give way to a conversational, frank style of writing that witnessed and accused, that demanded acknowledgement and memory, and that fought on beyond the reality of the turmoil his country was in. In 1976, Urondo took his own life by ingesting cyanide during a police chase in Mendoza.

was born in the town of Bisaccia (Avellino) in 1960. He has published several books of poems and prose, including Circo dell'ipocondria [Hypochondria's Circus (Le lettere, Firenze, 2007)] and Nevica e ho le prove - Cronache dal paese della cicuta [It's Snowing, and I Have the Proof - Chronicles from the Village of the Hemlock (Laterza, Bari, 2009)]. His book of short prose pieces, Vento forte tra Lacedonia e Candela - Esercizi di paesologia [Strong winds between Lacedonia and Candela - Exercises in Villageology (Laterza, Bari, 2008) was awarded the Premio Napoli in 2009.

was born in 1966 and lives in Burgundy, France. Since his studies in France, Germany and the Netherlands, Diart has developed a distinctive style founded on the relationship between words, history and the painted surface – a 'translation' of the word into pictorial substance and its deployment on the surface of the canvas.

He has exhibited in France, Germany and Austria, and collaborated on the portfolio « le secret », NORIA Éditions, Paris. His work can be found here.

He is represented by Galerie Scrawitch, Paris.

was born in 1973 in Toulouse where he studied communication and sociology. He now lives in Paris where he does residencies, public readings, and workshops as an Oulipo representative. He is one of the few members of the Oulipo to be born after its inception, and reading their works, most notably Queneau's Exercises du style, had a big influence on him and his writing. After completing the bilingual N/S with the English Oulipian Ian Monk, and going on to publish his own Opéras-minute (forthcoming from Burning Deck), Forte was adopted into the group as its thirty-fifth member. To date Forte has published five books, two translations, and numerous chapbooks.

is a Swedish poet born in 1968, currently living in Gothenburg, Sweden. He attended the creative writing program at the University of Gothenburg, an institution which has fostered some of the country's better-known writers, and has since become an established force in new forms of poetic expression there. En annorlunda praktik (A Different Practice) was his first book, published by Norstedts Förlag in 1998. Subsequent books Blomsterur – Förklaringar och Dikter (Clockwork of Flowers: Explanations and Poems), and Åren (The Years), were published in 2000 and 2002, respectively. In 2003, Nyberg wrote the play Tunnelsång (Tunnel Song), commissioned by Gothenburg's Cinnnober Theater with the mission to stimulate and develop contemporary Swedish theatre. Nyberg serves on the editorial board of the Swedish literary publication OEI.

has previously published himself in three Swedish collections, some which has been translated into English, and a select number of Swedish magazines; he has also been published in Catalonian and in on-line presses Moria and REDOCHRELiT as well as being the editor of a democratic masspoem project realized in three issues. He has studied creative writing in Skurups Writing school and is now doing the same at Lunds University. He also writes literary criticism in Tidningen Kulturen and runs the personal blog Anatematisk. Freke Räihä is the angriest poet of his generation.

was born in 1921 in Konolfingen, Switzerland, the son of a Protestant pastor. He grew up in Bern, and studied philosophy and German literature before deciding to pursue a career as a writer and dramatist. From the early 1950s on he made a name for himself—both in Switzerland and abroad—with philosophical mystery novels, most famously The Pledge (1958), and provocative and darkly comic plays such as The Visit (1956). Throughout his life, his main focus was on the theatre; he combined hands-on theatrical work with extensive theorizing on his own brand of epic theatre. A talented visual artist, he left a distinguished body of painting and graphic work that complements his literary oeuvre. He died in Neuchâtel in 1990, universally regarded as one of Switzerland’s greatest modern writers.

was born in 1966 in Bad Kleinen (Mecklenburg-West Pomerania). Later he moved to East Berlin and completed High School there. He then did his military service in the army, followed by training as a television technician. He worked with alternative theatre groups associated with the Church. In 1987 he moved to West Germany. He did casual work as a waiter, assistant director, and taxi-driver in Bavaria. In Bavaria he made his first attempts at writing. He returned to Berlin in 1990. In Berlin he gained full-time employment with a design control company, based in the Moabit district. He has been writing plays since 1990 and is married with three children.

was Taiwan's top representative in Japan from 2000 to 2004. Born in Sakae-machi, Chiayi in 1935, Lo graduated with a B.A. in economics from National Taiwan University, an M.A. in economics from Waseda University, and a Ph.D. in regional science from the University of Pennsylvania. Among his many outstanding contributions to the field of economic research, Lo has worked in The United Nations Centre for Regional Development as Chief of Comparative Studies and in the The United Nations University as Senior Academic Officer.

is the author of fourteen books, including novels, short story collections, children's books, plays, and nonfiction. In 2002, she received the prestigious Sapir Prize for Literature for the Hebrew version of The Confessions of Noa Weber, which was also her first book published in English. Confessions, translated by Dalya Bilu, won Three Percent's 2009 Best Translated Book Award. Hareven's story "The Slows" appeared in The New Yorker. Her second English-language novel, Lies: First Person, is scheduled to appear in 2014. She is a recent recipient of the Prime Minister's Prize for Literature, and she teaches creative writing in Jerusalem.

was born in Budapest on 23 November 1956 (a month into the Hungarian Revolution). He qualified as a secondary-school teacher of Hungarian and History (1983) and went on to the György Bálint School of Journalism. He has held various jobs as reporter and editor for non-literary and literary magazines as well as in Hungarian Radio's Literary Department (1999-present). His published books to date include three volumes of short fiction pieces: Angyal és bábu (Angel and Puppet, 1990), A semmi könyvébo›l (From the Book of Nothing, 1992) and Eleven hal (Living Fish, 1994), all reissued in a single volume as Elnézheto› látkép (Overlookable Prospect, 2003) as well as the short-fiction collection A huron tó (Lake Huron, 1998). More recently he had considerable success with the full novel Zsidó vagy? (Jewish, Are You?, 2004). Under the respective pseudonyms of György Gabriely and Lénárd Poletti he and literary historian/critic László Szilasi penned an epistolary spy novel Kész regény (Ready-Made Novel, 2001).

was born in Paris in 1808. He committed suicide in the same city in 1855. His works, including Voyage en Orient (1851), Sylvie (1853), and Les Filles du Feu (1854), influenced countless writers ranging from Marcel Proust to T. S. Eliot.

is a poet, essayist, translator and photographer. His writing explores the spaces between poetry and the essay, fiction and history, biography and autobiography. Like Ulysses, Macé asks what can we learn or hear when we travel? He asks readers to travel in their own language and to hear hidden associations which create unexpected ways of relating to things and people. His Wood Asleep, translated by David Kelley and Timothy Mathews is published by Bloodaxe Books. In 2008 he was awarded Le Grand Prix de Poésie by the Académie Française for his life's work.

is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Her research has engaged with the politics, poetics, and economics of violence, loss, and transgression. Her book, from Stanford University Press, Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji's Urdu Poetry (2002) focusing on a renegade writer, Miraji, reads gender and sexuality in twentieth century Urdu poetic movements that emerge out of the lyric of loss. She has translated widely from from prose and poetry composed in Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, Braj and Awadhi. Patel's most recent manuscripts on South Asia, Homeliness and its desserts: Rethinking Ismat Chughtai, Billboard Intimacies and Gendering the Global Nation (New Delhi: Women Unlimited forthcoming) are informed by comparative literature and film studies, queer/gender theory, political economy, postcolonial/diaspora/ subaltern historiography, and crossover questions from raced cyborg feminism and physics. Her current project Insuring Selves, Assuring a Future: The Poetics of Finance (manuscript in progress) on insurance, pensions, transnational capital, rights and state formations (from 1750-2002) in South Asia, works through gender to grapple with the liaisons between capital, subjectivity and loss.

(1915-2001) remains one of the major European poets of the twentieth century. He started as an orthodox Surrealist, together with André Breton and Victor Brauner in the Paris of the 1930s, where he pursued a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne. After returning home to Romania in the early 1940s, he embarked on a solitary and prolific career that kept his verse inexpugnable to the Communist regime's political agenda while continuously reshaping surrealism into a chameleonic complex œuvre that absorbed popular culture along with sophisticated references, and managed to fuse a wide range of styles and dictions. His highly influential work both encompassed and veiled political critique, Eastern and Western spirituality, occultism, literary tradition, and mordant oneiric ironies.

is a novelist and essayist, as well as the thirty-fifth chief priest of the Fukuju-ji Zen Buddhist temple in the town of Miharu, Fukushima. Born and raised in Miharu, he started writing novels while reading Chinese Literature and Drama at Keio University, Tokyo. His début novel, On the Prow (『水の舳先』), was shortlisted for the Akutagawa Prize, which he won the next year for his second novel, Flowers of Bardo (『中陰の花』). He has published more than twenty novels, including The Feast of Abraxas (『アブラクサスの祭』), Amitaba（ 『アミターバ　無量光明』), A House in which a Dragon Resides (『龍の棲む家』), and A.D.L—Activities of Daily Living ( 『Aデール』), which was shortlisted for the Kawabata Yasunari Prize for Literature in 2008. His work, which explores the application of Buddhist or Zen teachings in everyday contexts, has been translated into French, German, Korean and Chinese. As an influential leading writer and committee member of the government's Reconstruction Design Council, Gen'yū is currently a major voice in national reconstruction after the massive earthquake that hit Japan on May 11, 2011. His homepage can be found here.

is a former Washington and foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, who has written articles on the Japanese American experience for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and West Magazine, in addition to the Baltimore Sun. His memoir, In Search of Hiroshi, was published in 1988. Now retired, he lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife Sabine.

Hu Jun (June) is currently a professor from the English department of Beijing Language and Culture University. Her research interest covers British and American fiction, women's literature, multiethnic American literature and feminism.

(1934-2006) was a Chuvash Russian poet, widely acknowledged as a seminal influence on post-war Russian avant-garde poetry for his synthesis of traditional folk lyric and the work of such European poets as Paul Celan and the French poets he translated into Chuvash, a Turkic language. His friendship with Boris Pasternak attracted the attention of Soviet authorities and he was expelled from the Gorky Institute of Literature in 1958 for "composing a book of oppositional poems undermining the basic methods of socialist realism" (not published until 1993). Having previously written in his native Chuvash, he began to write poetry in Russian in 1960 following Pasternak's suggestion. For the following ten years he worked in Moscow's Mayakovsky Museum and occupied himself with translating world poetry into Chuvash, including the anthologies Poets of France, Poets of Hungary, and Poets of Poland. His own first book did not appear in Russia until Perestroika in 1991, though his work had been well-received abroad since the 60s. Befriended by the British translator, Peter France, his Selected in English appeared first in 1997 and a new Selected is just out from Wave Books. Aygi was awarded the Andrey Bely Prize (1987), the Pasternak Prize (2000), and the Prize of the French Academy (1972), and was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

is a poet, translator, and psychotherapist. She was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and grew up in New York City. She is the author of the chapbooks Calendar (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2002), The Tides (Octopus Books, 2007), New Year's Day (Octopus Books, 2011), and Dear Jenny (Supermachine, 2011). Her original poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, Aufgabe, Octopus, jubilat, Supermachine, Gulf Coast, and other publications. Her translation of Aleksandr Skidan's Red Shifting was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2008. She is the co-translator (with Stephanie Sandler) of Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) which won the University of Rochester's Three Percent 2010 award for Best Translated Book of Poetry. She is also a co-translator of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko's Endarkenment: Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 2014). She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

is the author of A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books That Capture the Spirit of Africa and the editor of African Lives: An Anthology of Memoirs and Autobiographies. A section from Yasmina Khadra's memoir The Writer, translated for African Lives by Alexis Pernsteiner and Antoine Bargel, appears in this issue. Wisner writes for publications including The Christian Science Monitor, Warscapes, and Words without Borders.

is a Hungarian-born poet and academic, Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. He has published numerous books of poetry in Hungarian. His last collection in English was Polishing October (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2009). He lives in London.

was born in Hungary and emigrated to England with his parents—survivors of concentration and labor camps—after the 1956 Budapest uprising.

Szirtes studied painting at Harrow School of Art and Leeds College of Art and Design. At Leeds he studied with Martin Bell, who encouraged Szirtes as he began to develop his poetic themes: an engaging mix of British individualism and European fluency in myth, fairy tale, and legend. Szirtes's attention to shape and sound, cultivated through his background in visual art and his bilingual upbringing, quickly led to his successful embrace of formal verse. In an essay in Poetry magazine defending form, Szirtes argues that "rhyme can be unexpected salvation, the paper nurse that somehow, against all the odds, helps us stick the world together while all the time drawing attention to its own fabricated nature."

His first book, The Slant Door (1979), won the Faber Memorial Prize. Bridge Passages (1991) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Reel (2004) won the T.S. Eliot Prize, and his New and Collected Poems was published by Bloodaxe in 2008.

is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, among them The North and Beyond the North (2001), Monograms on the Stones of the North (2005), Other Poems from the North (2007), The Blind Man from the North (2009), and Gold and Ivy (2011). In 2011, the dual-language Alte Poeme din Nord / Other Poems from the North, with English translations by Adam J. Sorkin with Olimpia Iacob, appeared in Iași, Romania, from Editura Fundației Culturale Poezia. Not surprisingly, Vulturescu was born, and lives, in the north of Romania—the province of Satu Mare, where he works for the cultural administration. Among his many prizes is the Romanian Cultural Order of Merit for Literature granting him the title of "Cavaler" ("Knight"). His poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Parthenon West Review, Literary Chaos, UCity Review, Connotation Press, Inventory, and Poetry Wales.

is the author of The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise, reviewed in the Oct 2012 issue.

(1894-1958)  started as an acmeist poet, who emigrated to Paris after the revolution. He is similar to Akhmatova and Mandelshtam, in that his images are meant to literally represent his meaning, in contrast with symbolist poetry (Blok or Bely) in which meaning is separated from reality and interpreted through a symbol.  He moved to a more nihilistic, European style toward the end of his life.

is an Irish writer now living in Canada where he teaches at the University of New Brunswick and is a Fiction Editor with The Fiddlehead. His most recent collection of poetry Games of Chance: A Gambler's Manual was published by Oberon Press, Fall 2011. His collection Digging My Own Grave (Dedalus Press) won second prize in the Patrick Kavanagh Award. He has published two novels, including The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars) which was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2004. His short story 'Sightings of Bono' was adapted into a short film featuring Bono (U2).

is an Urdu poet.

are reviewed by Aamer Hussein in the July 2011 issue.

was born in Mexico City, 1979. He studied screenwriting at the Center for Film Training (CCC) and holds a Diploma from SOGEM (the Mexican Union of Writers). He received a fellowship from the Foundation for Mexican Letters (FLM, 2007-2009), and won the Gerardo Mancebo del Castillo National Prize for Young Playwrights for his play Alaska (2007-2008). Alaska was also selected and presented in the National Festival of Young Playwrights in Querétaro in 2008 and in the Seventh Annual Week of Contemporary Playwriting in 2009. The play was also produced at the Foro La Gruta theater, directed by Roberto Duarte. It premiered in Madrid, Spain, at La Grada theater (directed by Lidio Sánchez Caro) as part of the Festival Mexico Onstage 2010. Produced in 2011 at the Teatro La Capilla (Mexico City) by director Luis Eduardo Yee. Gibrán's play Satélite 2012, co-written with Alsonso Ruiz Palacios, was produced at the Santa Catarina theater, directed by Alonso Ruiz Palacios, as part of the festival In 2012 "Men Will Be Lost, The Gods Will Be Lost," organized by UNAM in 2009 (the National Autonomous University of Mexico). The play was remounted in 2010 in the theater Xavier Villaurrutia. Gibrán's play Faraway, fly was produced at the Teatro Isabela Corona (directed by Emanuel Márquez) and also participated in the Intercultural Encounter of Iberoamerican Theater in Bolivia, 2010.

is an internationally published poet. She has four volumes of poetry published in Hebrew: Lint Season (Pardes, 2011), My Forces Fire (Even Hoshen, 2007), Reflected Like Joy (Gavanim, 2002), and Contact Glue (Gavanim, 2001). In North America, her poetry collection Living on a Blank Page was published in two editions (Blue Angel Press, 2009). Her work is featured in North American journals, such as The Literary Review of Canada, TOK1: Writing the New Toronto, Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, and Cahoots Magazine, as well as Israeli ones, such as Emda and Helicon.

is a playwright from Cyprus. His plays include A Sunday Sketch, A Hijacking, In the Kingdom of Cyprus, Manolis!!!, The Change, Full Meze, About Love and Not Only, and DNA, which was awarded the Prize for Best Playwriting at the biannual THOC Theatre awards for 2009–2011. He is a member of the Cyprus Playwrights Association, was a member of the Artistic Committee for THOC (Cyprus Theatre Organization—State Theatre) from 1991 to 1993, and served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the THOC from 2003 to 2006. Since 1998, he has served as Patron for Cyprus at the Biennale of Wiesbaden "New Plays for Europe," and he is currently the president of the Cyprus Centre of International Theatre Institute and a member of the Executive Council of the ITI worldwide. He has also written for television, including the comedic series Topsy Turvy, Taxi Station, and Sweepings.

might be seen as the founding figure of modern Italian poetry. Born in 1855 in the Italian region of Emilia Romagna, he withstood a series of early family tragedies and went on to live—orphaned and in charge of his two younger sisters—throughout Italy, teaching Greek and Latin in high schools and finally inheriting the esteemed position of Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna from his mentor, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Giosuè Carducci. In addition to writing poems in Italian, Pascoli also composed in Latin and won a number of international awards for his classical verse.

Pascoli could be considered as an Italian equivalent to both Robert Frost and Ezra Pound. He is more like Frost in his particular combination of lyrical transcendence and dark sensibility, and for the fact that every Italian school kid memorizes his terrifically musical poems. And like Pound, he modernized the Italian language for contemporary poetry, revolutionizing classical standards that poets upheld into the nineteenth century through a new use of dialect and natural speech. He was the author of numerous books of poetry, including his famous Myricae and Canti di Castelvecchio, from which most of these translations have been culled. Pascoli died in 1912.

is a poet, prose writer, and essayist. He was born in Moscow, graduated with a degree in journalism from Moscow State University, and currently lives in Moscow, where he serves as chief-editor of Novaya Yunost (New Youth), a literary magazine.  He is a translator of Ted Hughes, Robert Hass, and W. H. Auden's poetry into Russian. Shulpyakov's books of travel essays, Persona Grappa and Uncle's Dream, were published in Russia in 2002 and 2005.  He is also the author of the guide Cognac, and novels The Book of Sinan (2005), Tsynami (2008), and Fez (2010).  His first full-length book of poetry, The Flick, was published in Russia in 2001, the same year he was awarded a Triumph Prize for his poetry. His most recent collection of poetry is Acorn (2007).

was born in 1975 in Skopje, Macedonia. He was educated at the Charles University in Prague, at Central European University in Budapest and at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, where he now works at the Institute for Literature. He is the author of the novels Conversation with Spinoza and Sigmund Freud's Sister. His works are translated into English, Serbian, German, Slovenian, Polish and Croatian.

was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1970 and teaches theory of science in Lisbon. Nobel Laureate José Saramago stated: "In thirty years' time, if not before, Tavares will win the Nobel Prize, and I'm sure my prediction will come true . . . Tavares has no right to be writing so well at the age of 35. One feels like punching him." In 2005 Tavares won the José Saramago Prize. His novel Jerusalem was also awarded the Prêmio Portugal Telecom de Literatura em Língua Portuguesa 2007 and the LER/Millenium Prize. His novel Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique received the prestigious Best Foreign Book Prize 2010 in France.

is a researcher at Argentina's National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and professor of Brazilian literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Stanford universities in the USA, and at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He is the author of Poesía concreta brasileña: las vanguardias en la encrucijada modernista (2003, also translated into Portuguese), Otros mundos: ensayos sobre el nuevo cine argentino (2003, translated into English as New Argentine Films: Other worlds), Borges va al cine (2010, in collaboration with Emiliano Jelicié), and Por una ciencia del vestigio errático (Ensayos sobre la antropofagia de Oswald de Andrade) (2010).

Ellen Jones edits the Criticism section of Asymptote. She holds an undergraduate degree in English literature and Spanish, and a Masters in English Language from the University of Oxford. She is currently researching literary multilingualism in contemporary English and Spanish fiction at Queen Mary University of London. Her website can be viewed here.

Paula Porroni was born in Buenos Aires and is Asymptote's UK editor-at-large. She holds an M.Phil in Latin American studies from the University of Cambridge and an M.F.A. in creative writing in Spanish from New York University. She works as a cultural critic and translator, and is now finishing her first novel. She lives in London.

is a research scholar in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. The author of Manhunts: A Philosophical History, he lives in Paris.

was born in 1962 in Gdańsk and grew up in Warsaw. Since 1985 he has lived in Copenhagen. He has published nine volumes of poetry and two collections of short prose pieces in Poland; three books of poetry, a book of poetic prose, and an experimental novel (translations) in Denmark; and selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He has also published a selection of plays. English translations of Wróblewski's poetry have appeared in Poetry London, Jacket, Chicago Review, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, chapbooks, and volumes such as Our Flying Objects: Selected Poems (Equipage, 2007), A Marzipan Factory: New and Selected Poems (Otoliths, 2010), and Let's Go Back to the Mainland (Červená Barva Press, 2014). Piotr Gwiazda's translations of Wróblewski's poetry have appeared in AGNI Online, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Nation, and Seneca Review. His translation of Wróblewski's book of prose poems Kopenhaga has just been published by Zephyr Press.

is an author.

is a writer and an ethnologist. Born in Mostaganem (Algeria) in 1947, he lives and works between Constantine and Paris (where he teaches sociology and ethnology at the Université d'Evry val d'Essonne). Considered as one of the Maghreb's most forceful and visionary poetic voices of the post-colonial era, Tengour, who authored a "Manifesto of Maghrebian Surrealism" in 1981, explores the Algerian cultural space in all its ramifications : the oral and hagiographic traditions, the popular imagination and the founding myths, collective memory, raï music and the lived experiences of exile – all this in writing formally so profoundly hybridized that the critics have forged a term to define this phenomenon, namely "soufialism" (Hédi Abdel-Jaouad). The subjects that are closest to his heart are the Algerian cultural identity and memory as they are being mestizoed and woven between Orient and Occident, especially under the impact of the experiences of exile and migration. See for example L'Epreuve de l'Arc (1990), his "maqamât-novel," Gens de Mosta (1997), his novel composed of short stories, Ce Tatar-là (1999), his poem set in the working class suburbs, or Retraite (2004), a collection inspired by the rundown hotels of Belsunce quarter in Marseille, where the photographic image (Olivier de Sépibus) and the poetic word converge to say the difficulty of aging in exile. Here, as elsewhere, the double vision of poet and ethnologist achieves surprising symbioses, for Tengour, the cynical observer of his society, proposes through his narratives a fragmented chronical of post-colonial Algeria under the dismal light of History or of myth: emigration in Tapapakitaques (1976), the decline of socialism in Sultan Galièv ou La rupture des stocks (1981/85), the rise of fundamentalism in Le Vieux de la Montagne (1983). Le Poisson de Moïse (2001), his latest novel, tries to understand what makes young Algerians eager to join the Taliban.

is one of the classical masters of Persian poetry. He was born in Shiraz, Iran, in the early 14th century. His ghazals excel both in musicality as well as in intricate wordplay. Because of both its incredible style as well as its deft philosophical treatment of such themes as death, love, and divine worship, his verse has had a lasting and pervasive influence on Persian language and culture.

(1886–1942) is a seminal figure in modern Japanese literature who broke traditional poetic forms in favor of a free verse style that mixed literary and everyday diction with intense imagery, deep philosophy, and various verbal distortions. An accomplished mandolin player, Hagiwara was the author of six books of poetry, as well as collections of essays and aphorisms. Hagiwara's The Iceland, translated by Hiroaki Sato, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2014. 

has been reviewed in Asymptote.

(1964–1989) was born and raised in a farming village in Anhui Province. When he was fifteen he passed the entrance exam to the prestigious Beijing University, and at twenty, he started teaching philosophy and art theory at China University of Political Science and Law. Between 1984 and 1989, he wrote about 200 poems and several epics. He committed suicide in March 1989 by lying on a railroad track at Beijing Shanhaiguan. His books, published posthumously in China, include Earth (1990), Works of Hai Zi and Luo Yihe (1991), Poems of Hai Zi (1995), The Complete Works of Hai Zi (1997), Hai Zi (2006), Selected Works of Hai Zi (2006), and Poetry of Hai Zi (2007).

is a poet, translator and critic. His translations and criticism appear or are forthcoming in XCP, Rhino, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. Born in Vietnam and raised in Wisconsin, he currently lives in Gainesville, Florida.

was born in 1965 in Ankara, Turkey. He received his medical degree in 1989. Following his graduation, he spent many years working in Europe and the Far East. Currently, he is a faculty member at the Medical School of Kocaeli University in Turkey. His expertise is in cancer genetics. Hakan Savlı is a prolific poet. Turuncu (Orange-colored), his latest and sixth volume of poetry came out in 2009. Savlı is the winner of three prestigious poetry prizes. His poetry attests to the possibility of a lyrical experience in a world where all sorts of "cancers" threaten the world and living beings.

is the pen name of Ann Jong Juan. He was born in Singapore and can trace his ancestry to Wenchang province in Hainan. He began writing xiangsheng sketches in the 1970s, and in the eighties moved on to full-length and short plays. He has published three volumes of xiangsheng and a collection of plays for the stage. In 1990, Han Lao Da was awarded the Singapore Cultural Medallion (Theatre). Other awards include the Hou Baolin Broadcast Award and the 1994 National Book Award for 'The Story of the Merlion'.

is one of Israel's leading dramatists. He was born in Tel Aviv and studied philosophy and literature at Tel Aviv University. At first he wrote poetry, but later on decided to concentrate on the theater. He became resident playwright of the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv and also worked with Habimah, Israel's national theater. Levin wrote fifty plays, thirty-four of which habe been staged. His work includes comedies, tragedies, and satiric cabarets, most of which he directed himself. In addition, he published five books of short stories and poems, and a book for children. He received numerous theater awards both in Israel and abroad—most notably at the Edinburgh Festival—and his plays have been staged around the world. Levin was awarded the Bialik Prize in 1994.

was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into forty-two languages. The most recent of his many honors is the Franz Kafka Prize.

was born in the village of Noumairieh in southern Lebanon in 1950 and moved as a child to Beirut, though like so many Lebanese families, his retained strong links to the village and returned there every summer. Daoud studied Arabic literature at university and worked as a reporter throughout Lebanon's civil war. He is the editor of the 'Nawafidh' cultural supplement of the Beirut daily al-Mustaqbal and the author of two volumes of short stories and eight novels, four of which have already appeared in English translation. He is widely respected throughout the Arab world, and his work 180 Sunsets was longlisted for the Arabic Booker Prize.

is the author of Et Voici La Chanson (L'Amandier, 2012), Le Héros (Flammarion, 2008), Alparegho, Pareil-à-rien (L'Act Mem, 2005), D'ici, de ce berceau (Flammarion, 2003), and De la main gauche, exploratrice (Flammarion, 1999). She is also published in online journals (two audio texts on publie.net), and anthologies, and has participated in radio broadcasts, festivals, and interviews in France and abroad. She often combines her work with other arts, notably visual arts (artists' sketch books).

(b. 1936, Moreno) is one of Argentina's finest storytellers. Her collected works, Relatos Reunidos, were published by Alfaguara in 2010, winning an award at the 2011 Buenos Aires Book Fair. Her latest collection of travel essays, Visto y Oído, was published by Adriana Hidalgo in 2012. She lives in Buenos Aires.

was born in Romania, where she grew up as part of the minority German community. Her first book, Niederungen, written in 1982, was banned by the censors. Continued political persecution drove her to emigrate to Germany in 1987, and since then she has published a number of books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. All her writing reflects her experience of political oppression and exile, exploring their effects on the individual. Her books translated into English include Nadir (Niederungen), The Passport (Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt), The Land of Green Plums (Herztier), and The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel). Herta Müller is the recipient of over twenty literary awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

(1955-1991) was a French writer and photographer. A critic for Le Monde, he was the author of some thirty books, most notably To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which presents an intimate portrait of Michel Foucault, and played a significant role in changing public attitudes in France toward AIDS. Hervé Guibert also produced an important body of photographs, which was exhibited in 2011 as a retrospective by the Maison européenne de la photographie. In Ghost Image, a book whose subject is photography and in which no photographs appear, Guibert proposes a textual mise-en-scène of photography. La pudeur ou l'impudeur, Guibert's only film, follows the last months of his life in plenary detail. Hervé Guibert died in Paris at the age of 36 following a failed suicide attempt on the isle of Elba. His posthumously published journals, The Mausoleum of Lovers, are among his most esteemed works.

was born in 1946 in Harderwijk, The Netherlands, a small city in the eastern part of the country, on the Ijsselmeer (formerly known as the Zuider Zee). Since 1972 she has lived in Rotterdam. Her first collection of poems, Tussen gebaren en woorden (Between Gestures and Words) was published in 1982; since that time she has published thirteen more collections of poetry. She has been recognized with numerous national awards: in 2000 she received the prestigious Herman Gorter Prize for the poem-cycle Antidood (Antideath); in 2001 she was awarded the Anna Blaman Prize for her entire œuvre, and in 2009 she received the A. Roland Holst prize.

was born in 1966 in Fukushima. He made his literary debut in 1998 with the novel 13, and has since created violent, apocalyptic versions of cities (Tokyo in Soundtrack, 2003), regions (northern Japan in Holy Family, 2008), and the world (Namu Rock&Roll 21 Part Sutra, 2013). Since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, he has also written and performed dramatic monologues throughout Japan, and in August 2013, he was joined by translator Motoyuki Shibata and other writers for a two-day 'summer school' on literature held in his hometown, Koriyama. His 2005 novel, Belka, Why Don't You Bark?, was translated into English by Michael Emmerich and published in 2012.

(1908-1999) was born in Hyderabad and moved to Lahore in 1936 when she married the writer Imtiaz Ali Taj. She was a renowned novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright and diarist, and the subcontinent's first woman pilot.  After a period of  neglect, her books were reprinted as modern classics, to great acclaim, in the 90s. The subject of several critical studies, she is now recognised as a leading name in 20th century Urdu literature.

was born in 1930 in Jaú, Brazil. A prolific writer whose work spans many different genres, including poetry, fiction, drama and newspaper columns, her eccentric personality — she claimed she would go to a planet called Marduk in her afterlife — attracted more public attention than her work. She was a beautiful woman with an active social life in São Paulo, but at a certain point she decided to retreat to the countryside to dedicate herself entirely to writing. She died in 2004, and while she had already received some public recognition, many of her important books were already out-of-print by then. Her popularity has grown since then, and all of her books have been published in new editions. Some of her work has also been translated into Italian, French, Spanish and German.

was born Kawakata Shoichi on December 9, 1893 in Osaka. He attended Sophia University in Tokyo for three years before dropping out and attending Gyosei Gakko to study Italian. He started writing poetry in 1912, later publishing Japanese Futurist poetry and manifestos in numerous coterie journals from 1916 to 1922. A tuberculosis patient, he often failed to make ends meet for his common-law wife and child, passing away on July 20, 1922. He was twenty-nine years old.

is "perhaps the finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English" (Gary Snyder), the author of Snow in a Silver Bowl: A Quest for the World of Yugen, and a contributor to a recent expanded edition of Naoki Inose's Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima. His translations of Hagiwara's Cat Town and The Iceland are forthcoming in 2014.

is a contributing editor at Asymptote. Authors he has translated from the Chinese include virtually all major contemporary novelists. Recent translations include Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong, Su Tong's Boat to Redemption, and, with Sylvia Li-chun Lin, Bi Feiyu's Three Sisters, all winners of the Man Asian Literary Prize. He and his wife divide their time between South Bend, Indiana, and Boulder, Colorado.

is the author and designer of six volumes of groundbreaking verse, notably Pink Noise (2007), a bilingual collection of English-language poems and computer-generated Chinese translations printed on crystal clear vinyl in pink and black ink, and, most recently, Poems, Sixty of Them (2011). 'Now These Objects Will Move by Themselves' is from her fourth book of poetry, Salsa (1999), which is now in its eighth print-run. The appended performance of the Chinese poem was recorded by Hsia Yü and Yan Jun in Taipei in late December and subsequently mixed by Yan Jun in Beijing.

Yan Jun is a Gansu-born, Beijing-based performance poet, writer, and self-professed "improviser and sound hypnotizer," who curates the monthly music events at the Beijing contemporary art centre UCCA and is one of the principal organizers of Mini Midi, China's annual experimental music festival.

is one of the most important contemporary Taiwanese writers. During the 1960s as a major contributor to the influential Literature Quarterly, Huang was hailed as a representative of hsiang-t'u wen-hsueh, the "nativist literature movement" that focused on the lives of rural Taiwanese people. In more recent works he has turned his attention to urban culture and life in Taiwan's growing cities. Titles that have been translated into English (by Howard Goldblatt) include The Drowning of an Old Cat and Other Stories (1980) and The Taste of Apples (2001). A new collection will be forthcoming soon.

was born in 1982, at the beginning of Saddam's reign, and grew up during the Iran–Iraq War. Two years in a row he has been invited to perform at the Murbid Poetry Festival in Basra, a gathering of the who's who of Iraqi poets. Al-Saray manages Bayt AlShi'r (Line/Home of Poetry), a poetry project set out to give voice to any and all humanitarian issues of the Arab world. Since 2004, he has worked as a freelance journalist, writing for the online paper Modern Discussion, a media outlet that publicizes important dialogues about secularism and human rights. His poetry collection, The Desert Laughs Alone (2009), published by the Beirut press Dar Al-Farabi, depicts a destroyed Baghdad during the US occupation of Iraq.

is the author of Exit, Civilian, selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, and The Next Country. She received a 2012 Contributor's Prize from the Poetry Foundation for poems in her cahier, forthcoming from Sylph Editions, Clarice: The Visitor, a response in poems to her experience translating Clarice Lispector's novel The Passion According to G.H. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

is a Russian poet, essayist and broadcaster. He grew up in the city of Chernovtsy (Ukraine). In 1978 his writing and dissident activities led to KGB pressure to emigrate. Settling in London, he worked first for the BBC, then Radio Liberty. Since 1989 his writing has appeared regularly in leading Russian literary magazines. His two most recent book-length cycles of poems – World Service (Radio Lyrics) and KGB Poems – were published in Moscow by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. KGB Poems was published in Ukrainian translation by Grani-T, Kiev. Igor Pomerantsev lives in Prague.

was born in the Volyn region of Ukraine in January 1967 and studied at the St. Petersburg Military University, which he left in order to pursue his career as a writer. He was as a result sentenced to a period of hard labour in the Taiga, working on what was literally a road to nowhere. He regained his liberty in the chaos accompanying the fall of the Soviet Union. His work has won numerous awards and is marked by a simplicity of diction and an emotional honesty. Translations of his poetry have appeared in Acumen, the Apple Valley Review, Envoi, Barnwood and Zaporogue.

(b. 1940) originally trained as an accountant, but later began to write poetry. She has degrees in philosophy and has also worked in journalism and films. From Pǎsǎrea Tǎiatǎ (The Slaughtered Fowl, 1967) onward, her poems draw on rural life and folklore, on religious and literary icons; but their true focus has been on the trauma of history. Her tenth collection, Urcarea Muntelui (Climbing the mountain), was heavily censored on its first appearance in 1985, and reappeared in its full form only after the change of regime. Mǎlǎncioiu's writing is valued in Romania as a moral force. A courageous critic of the former political masters of her country, she has also been forthright in her responses to the new order.

(1921-) is considered one of the most important writers of postwar German literature. Her innovative and often radical body of work—including short stories, poems, radio plays, dialogues, aphorisms, essays, prose poems and one novel—has been awarded more than twenty prizes, including the Georg Trakl Prize (1979), the Franz Kafka Prize (1983), the Austrian State Prize (1995), and the Joseph Breitenbach Prize (together with W.G. Sebald and Markus Werner, 2000). "Dover" is included in her 1976 collection Schlechte Wörter (Bad words).

was born Iehiel-Leyb Arnoldovich Faynzilberg. He is a Soviet literary icon, and was famous for two satirical novels, The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf, as well as two books of travelogues, all co-authored with Yevgeniy Petrov (Yevgeniy Kataev). They are among the most widely read and quoted books in the Russian language. Prior to that, Ilf wrote hundreds of short stories, essays, editorials, and war dispatches. He wrote those early pieces without Petrov, and they remain mostly obscure and untranslated. Ilf was born in Odessa in 1897 and died in 1937.

was born in Budapest in 1929. At age fifteen he was deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, and finally to a subcamp at Zeitz, to labor in a factory where Nazi scientists were trying to convert coal into motor fuel. Upon liberation in 1945 he worked as a journalist before being fired for not adhering to the Communist party doctrine. After a brief service in the Hungarian Army, he devoted himself to writing, although as a dissident he was forced to live under Spartan circumstances. Nonetheless he stayed in Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising, continuing to write plays and fiction in near–anonymity and supporting himself by translating from the German writers such as Joseph Roth, Freud, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. He remained little–known until 1975, when he published his first book, Fatelesseness, a novel about a teenage boy sent to a concentration camp. It became the first book of a trilogy that eventually included The Failure and Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Subsequent titles include Liquidation, Union Jack, and, most recently, a memoir, The File on K. In 2002, Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Budapest and Berlin.

is a fresh voice in Lithuanian poetry. Her debut collection Žuvim ir lelijom (For Fish and Lilies) won the 2006 First Book Contest of the Lithuanian Union of Writers. Her second book Pasakos apie meilę ir kitus žvėris (Stories About Love and Other Animals) was published in 2011 and won the 2012 Young Jotvingian Prize at the Druskininkai Poetic Fall Festival; this is the most prestigious award for Lithuanian poets under thirty-five. In addition to being a poet, Valantinaitė is also a renowned singer. She studied at Vilnius University and The Vilnius Academy of Arts. She lives in Vilnius.

has published nine novels, the first five under the pseudonymn Lettie Viljoen. Three of her novels have been translated into English, and two into Dutch. The American edition of To Hell with Cronjé appeared in 2010 and The Book of Happenstance is forthcoming, both with Open Letter Press. Winterbach has received numerous literary awards, amongst others the prestigious Hertzog Prize, the M-Net Book Prize (twice), the W.A. Hofmeyr Prize (twice) and the University of Johannesburg Prize for Fiction (Afrikaans). Ingrid Winterbach is both a writer and a visual artist. She is married to the painter Andries Gouws, lives in Durban and has two daughters.

is a Romanian writer and theatre critic. Born in 1984, he grew up in Botoșani, in northeastern Romania. Since 2004 his articles, translations and short stories have appeared regularly in leading Romanian magazines and literary anthologies. His essays have been published in the Portuguese magazine Obscena and Alternatives théâtrales. In 2010, he won the International Association of Theatre Critics Award (Romanian board) for Young Critics. In the same year, he moved to Berlin to pursue his literary interests and to study at the European College of Liberal Arts. He now lives in Bucharest, but spends most of his time travelling and working on his first novel.

was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, Le Bal, The Courilof Affair, All Our Worldly Goods and other works published in her lifetime or soon after, as well as the posthumously published Suite Francaise and Fire in the Blood. The Wine of Solitude (Le Vin de Solitude) was first published in France in 1935. Nemirovksy died in Auschwitz in 1942.

(1919–1978) was born in Buenos Aires of an English father and an Italian mother. He was associated with the group of writers that included Jorge Luis Borges and Silvina Ocampo. During the 1940s, he wrote poetry, literary criticism, and short fiction in Spanish. Repulsed by Juan Perón's repressive government, he left Argentina and travelled first to England and then to Italy, where he settled in Rome. Here he reinvented himself as an Italian writer, producing a steady stream of poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism in Italian. He was also a prolific translator from English, French, and Spanish. His only book to be translated into English is The Temple of Iconoclasts (La sinagoga degli iconoclasti, 1972; Venuti's translation published by David R. Godine, 2014). Roberto Bolaño called it "without a doubt one of the funniest, most joyful, irreverent, and most corrosive books of the twentieth century" (in Natasha Wimmer's translation).

has been awarded many prizes, including the Booker Prize (twice). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His work includes Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Foe, and Slow Man, among others. 

teaches Slavic and comparative literature at Indiana University. He has recently published essays on topics like aerial photography and clone fictions in venues including the New Left Review, Comparative Literature, Science Fiction Studies, and The Iowa Review.

wrote Pieces of Shadow: Selected Poems, which is reviewed in our Oct 2011 issue.

is a translator and scholar of modern Italian literature. Formerly a co-editor of eXchanges and a translation fellow at Dalkey Archive Press, she holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and is currently pursuing a doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. She has translated a variety of fiction and non-fiction, most recently Giovanni Orelli's novel Walaschek's Dream and the collection of interviews with Viktor Shklovsky Witness to an Era. Other translations have appeared in such periodicals as World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, and Unsplendid, where her experimental translation of Giacomo Leopardi's "A se stesso" was published in 2012.

(b. 1981) lives in Oslo, Norway and works at the university in that city. He holds a Ph.D. in linguistics and tries very hard to forget about that fact when writing fiction. "The Minotaur" is from his third book of stories, Kropp og sinn, which would have been entitled Body and Mind if Norwegians spoke even more English than they do. His first collection was called Alt under kontroll (Everything Under Control), although it clearly isn't.

was born in Bratislava (Slovak Republic) in 1974. Her novel, Plán odprevádzania (Seeing People Off), won the 2012 European Union Prize for Literature. She's the author of three books of poetry, the novels: Parker The love novel (2001), and Plán odprevádzania (Seeing People Off) (subtitled Café Hyena) (2008),"and a collection of her newspaper columns, Jana Beňová—Dnes (Jana Beňová—Today). Her latest novel, Preč! Preč! (Away! Away!), was published in 2012. Since 2002, she has been a regular contributor to the popular Slovak daily, SME. She took part in Iowa's International Writing Program last Fall.

is a writer and photographer, who has covered conflict in Chad, Sudan, and the Horn of Africa for over twenty years. As a journalist, he has worked for National Geographic Magazine-France, Géo, Le Monde Diplomatique, XXI, Le Point, and Libération. His work has also been published in the London Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and Dispatches. He has worked as a researcher and photographer for organizations including the United Nations and the International Crisis Group, for which he is currently the Sudan Senior Analyst. He is the son of French ethnographers Joseph and Marie-José Tubiana, who studied Ethiopia, Darfur, and Chad. This chapter pays tribute to his late father. It was published in French as part of a longer book, Chroniques du Darfour (Glénat, 2010), whose English version is in need of a publisher.

was born in Ísafjörður, the most populous town in the Vestfirðir (West fjords) of Iceland, on February 18, 1898. The son of the poet Theódóra Thoroddsen and Skúli Thoroddsen, an important figure in the independence movement, he died in Copenhagen at the age of 26 on New Year’s Eve, 1924, after having been struck by a street-car a week earlier, on Christmas day. In his life time he published a book of poetry, Flugur (Flies) in 1922, as well as several other plays, poems and short stories in various journals and periodicals.

(1912-1978) was born in Vienna, Austria to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father who died in combat in the First World War. He studied literature and philosophy in the capital and fled, first to France, then to Belgium, with his first wife, after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. Arrested for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. As Soviet troops entered Poland, he was evacuated to Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen before being freed in April, 1945. Upon his return to Belgium, he learned of his first wife's death from a heart ailment. He supported himself as a journalist for the Swiss-German press before publishing his writings on Auschwitz, At the Mind's Limits, in 1964. Several other books followed, including the philosophical essay "On Suicide" and the novel Charles Bovary. Landarzt. Améry committed suicide in 1978.

is the author of nine novels. His writing has been compared to the work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Tati, and Jim Jarmusch.

is a graduate of the M.F.A. writing program at Washington University in St. Louis where she is currently a junior writer-in-residence. She is from Vermont.

(1903-78) was a Danish writer who published his first collection in 1926 (the living violin/den levende violin) to be followed by more than twenty-five other volumes, including poetry, novels, plays and travel books. In 1985 Curbstone Press published his Selected Poems, translated by Alexander Taylor, and in 1999, his collected poems appeared from Gyldendal Publishers (Schades Digte/Schade's Poems). At first neglected because of the strong erotic themes of his poems, Schade was for more than fifty years a prominent figure in the Copenhagen literary world and brown-bar life, together with his "muses" — the many girls he loved.

(1950- ) gained recognition as a poet when he won a Spring Literary Award from the Joseon Ilbo, a major South Korean newspaper. His poetry collections are Seulpeumi gippeumege (Sorrow to Joy, 1979), Seoului yesu (Seoul's Jesus, 1982), Saebyeok pyeonji (Dawn Letter, 1987), Byeolteureun ttatteuthada (Stars Are Warm, 1990), Saranghadaga jugeobeoryeora (Love, Then Die, 1997), Oerounikka saramida (Human Because Lonely, 1998), Nunmuri namyeon gichareul tara (If Tears Flow, Take a Train, 1999), I jalbeun sigan dongan (During this Short Moment, 2004), Poong (Embrace, 2007), Bapgap (Rice-Price, 2010), and Yeohaeng (Journey, 2013). He received the Seoul City Literary Award in 1989. Other recognitions include the Jeong Ji-yong Literary Award, the Pyeonun Literary Award, the Sanghwa Poetry Award, and the Gongcho Literary Award.

is a Taiwanese psychiatrist as well as poet and essayist. His three collections of poems are A Wanted Man (2002), A Mental Home (2006) and Nobita (2009); his collections of essays Looking for Friends Along the Coastline (2004) and A Welder of the Milky Way (2011).

Born in Taoyuan, Taiwan, in 1976, Jing was educated at Chang Geng University, where he earned a general doctor's degree. In 2009, he passed his exams to qualify as a psychiatrist and started practicing in a hospital in Taipei.

In 1996, he began posting his first poems on BBS. By the time he set up his blog, "The Thief Who Steals From Jing Xianghai," in 2004, he had already acquired a loyal following as a result of his well-received debut collection, A Wanted Man, which came out in 2002. Celebrated by the poetry reading masses (these exist in Taiwan), Jing has been included in the annual anthology The Best Taiwanese Poetry almost every year since 2001 and is easily the best-selling as well as most acclaimed Taiwanese poet of his generation.

were born in Dublin in 1962. They co-represented Ireland at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 and have exhibited extensively both in Ireland and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include at Dublin City Art Gallery in 2012, the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin in 2004 and at Floating Up, Manchester and Temple Bar Gallery and Studios in 2003. Group exhibitions include Time's Arrow at the Rotunda Gallery in New York 2005, Presence at Gimpel fils, London, 2005, Are we there yet in Glassbox, Paris, Do something at Floating up in 2004; Arranged Marriage Outer Space(s) at the Contemporary Arts Council, Chicago USA and How things turn out at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin all in 2002.

is the author of a dozen books of poetry, including Songs From an Outcast, Tracks, and Raven Speaks. His short story collection, Alaskan, edited in part by J.D. Salinger, received a gold medal in the 2011 eLit Book Awards as the best short story collection in the nation. His novel, The Trap, received the James Jones Prize for a First Novel and was named a Notable Book by the New York Public Library and the American Library Association. His stories, poems, interviews and essays appear in over 400 periodicals. Learn more about the author at his website.

has recently translated books by Jacques Dupin (Of Flies and Monkeys, Bitter Oleander Press), Philippe Jaccottet (And, Nonetheless, Chelsea), and Pierre-Albert Jourdan (The Straw Sandals, Chelsea). He is also the author of the three-volume essay collection, Paths to Contemporary French Literature (Transaction), and Into the Heart of European Poetry (Transaction). Born in Des Moines in 1952, Taylor has lived in France since 1977.

was born in Sweden in 1978. He is the author of three novels and six plays. His first novel, One Eye Red, received the Borås Tidning award for best literary debut. His second novel, Montecore (published by Knopf in 2011), won several literary awards, including the Swedish Radio Award for best novel of the year. Khemiri's work has been translated into more than fifteen languages, and his plays have been performed by over forty international companies. In 2011 Invasion! premiered in New York and Khemiri was awarded a Village Voice Obie Award for playwriting.

was born in Sweden in 1978. He is the author of three novels and six plays. His first novel, One Eye Red, received the Borås Tidning award for best literary debut. His second novel, Montecore, (published by Knopf in 2011) won several literary awards including the Swedish Radio Award for best novel of the year. Khemiri's work have been translated into more than fifteen languages and his plays have been performed by over 40 international companies. In 2011 Invasion! premiered in New York and Khemiri was awarded a Village Voice Obie Award for playwriting.

Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at the University of Illinois where she is conducting her research in Basque-Spanish bilingualism. She investigates issues of ethnic and nationalistic identity along with current and past ideologies among the youth in the Basque Autonomous Community in Spain. She is also interested in contact-induced phenomena and how language policies may affect the use and acquisition of minority languages such as Basque. She has also translated the criticism of the Basque writer Kirmen Uribe's novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao into English. She is the creator of a Beginners' Basque and Culture class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, where she currently resides.

Julia Sanches is assistant editor at Asymptote. Brazilian by birth. She has lived in New York, Mexico City, Lausanne, Edinburgh, and Barcelona. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Philosophy and English Literature from the University of Edinburgh and a masters in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She was runner-up in MPT's poetry translation competition, winner of the SAND translation competition, and has translated work from the Spanish that has been published in Suelta. She works as a freelance translator, a private teacher of English and Portuguese, and a reader for Random House Mondadori. She is currently learning her sixth language and living in her sixth country.
Alba Tomàs Albina lives in Barcelona. She graduated in Classical Philology from the University of Barcelona (2010) and got her Master in Translation studies from the Pompeu Fabra University (2011), where she is now doing her PhD focused on the reception of classical myths in Catalan literature.

Charlie Ng Chak-Kwan is Asymptote's Hong Kong editor-at-large. She obtained her B.A. in English and M.Phil in English (Literary Studies) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2007 and 2009 respectively. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD project is titled: Lived Space and Performativity of British Romantic Poetry. The thesis employs spatial theories drawn from Henri Lefebvre and Merleau-Ponty for studying the re-creation of 'lived space' in the works of three Romantic poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Joanna Baillie. Her writings have appeared in《秋螢詩刊》(Qiu Ying Poetry) ,《字花》 (Fleurs des Lettres) and CU Writing in English.

Florian Duijsens (Asymptote's Senior Editor) is a writer and editor, was born in the Netherlands, and was schooled in the United States. His travel journalism has appeared in The Guardian and National Geographic Traveller, and his music writing at Askmen.com and elsewhere on the Web. He has a serious addiction to buying batches of Amazon Marketplace books and uses this to satisfy his various literary hungers—Virago early feminist classics, YA trilogies, gay fiction, and the 'lyrical essay', among many others. His (non-lit) blog and Twitter feed provide further indications to his splintered attention span. 

Avgi Daferera is a freelance translator who translates from Greek and Spanish into English and from Spanish and English into Greek. She graduated from the English Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick and an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. In 2012, the first year of the BCLT mentoring programme, she was the Greek mentee. Her translation of the short story "People are strange" by Christos Ikonomou will appear in the first translation issue of The Stinging Fly. Her interests include children's literature and poetry.

Yardenne Greenspan is a fiction writer and translator, born in Tel Aviv to a bilingual family. She has an MFA in Fiction and Literary Translation from Columbia University. In 2011 she received the American Literary Translators' Association Fellowship. She serves as an English-language manuscript reader for the Israeli publishing house Kinneret Zmora Bitan. Her short fiction, essays and translations have been published in Blue Stocking Society, Hot Metal Bridge, Two Lines, Words Without Borders and the New Vessel Press website. Yardenne is writing a novel about fatherhood, and her past and current translation projects include Life is Good, a fictionalized memoir by Rana Werbin (available on Amazon Kindle), Eating, a play by Yaakov Shabtai, The Sequoia Children, a fantastical-historical novel by Gon Ben Ari, As a Few Days, a stage adaptation of Meir Shalev's novel and Some Day, by Shemi Zarhin, which is forthcoming from New Vessel Press.
 
Sayuri Okamoto is an independent curator and translator. She holds M.A. degrees in Art History and Japanese Literature (Waseda University, Japan), certificates in Photography and Film (Art and Architecture School, Waseda University, Japan) and Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language (IIEL, UK). Born and raised in Shizuoka, Japan, she is currently living and working in London (UK) and Padua (Italy).

Agata A. Lisiak is the author of Urban Cultures of (Post)Colonial Central Europe (Purdue University Press 2010) and the translator into Polish of, among others, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb's Reinventing Political Culture: The Power of Culture versus the Culture of Power (Polity Press 2011). Recipient of the EURIAS Junior Fellowship 2013/14, Agata is based in Berlin where she teaches at Humboldt University and ECLA of Bard.

Aline Santos Barbosa is an English-Portuguese student, who lives in a not-so-well-known city in Brazil called Porto Alegre (in the state of Rio Grande do Sul). Since  she was little, she was interested in learning other languages, about other cultures and other types of life. And, there's no better way to do that than through all the literatures of the world. Cultural and political  subjects are her favorite themes. Now, she works as an editor and a publisher at a publishing house in her city. 

Casiana Ionita is a translator and consultant. She holds a PhD in French from Columbia University and a BA in Literature from Harvard. Her translations from English into Romanian include Zadie Smith's NW and Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic.

Bojana Gajski was born in Serbia in 1978. She is an English teacher and a literary translator. So far she has translated eight novels and numerous short stories and she's worked as a primary and secondary school teacher for twelve years. (Also, she feels really weird writing about herself like this.)

Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, then Czechoslovakia. After studying English and Slavonic languages and literature at universities in Cologne, London (Czech and Slovak literature) and Munich she settled in the UK, where she spent more than 20 years working for Amnesty International. She travelled widely in Eastern and Central Europe and the former USSR following the changes in 1989, deepening her knowledge of the languages and literatures of the region. Since moving to the US in 2008 she has worked as a freelance translator from English, Czech, Slovak, German, Polish and Russian into Slovak and English, and administers the Facebook group Slovak Literature in English translation (which includes information on translations of Czech literature). She is Chair of the NGO Rights in Russia, and divides her time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and London.

Beatriz Leal Riesco is a critic of contemporary art and film, a freelance writer and lecturer focusing on world cinema, and an independent film curator. Her work appears regularly in academic journals in English and Spanish, and she is a frequent contributor to online publications including Africa Is a Country, Rebelión, GuinGuinBali, and Okayafrica. She is a consultant for the New York African Film Festival and lives in Philadelphia with the translator Adrian West.

Mariya Voynova was born in Lviv, Ukraine in 1979. She she's got a master's degree in Computer Science and has been working in the Information Technologies since. Besides that she studied psychology and photography and she is a member of Ukrainian Photographic Alternative group and co-founder of "4in1" group. She moved to the United States from Ukraine in 2010, though staying an active member of local cultural life. She has participated in many exhibitions in Ukraine as well as one in Stockholm. Mariya has started studying Swedish recently.

was born in New York City in 1967. His novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) was published in French in 2006. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.

was born in Mexico City in 1957. His books include: Paloma de otros diluvios (1990), El cardo en la voz (1991), Isla de las manos reunidas (1997), Paso de ciervo (1998), Vena cava (2002), and Alianza de los reinos (2004). In 2004, the University of Mexico published his collected poetry under the title, Región, 1982-2002. He has received numerous awards for his poetry and translations, including grants from the French Ministry of Culture and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. His book, Descripción de un brillo azul cobalto, from which these poems are taken, received the 2009 Jaime Sabines prize. His most recent publications are Teoría del campo unificado (2013) and Nuevo elogio del libro (2014), a collection of twenty short essays on the book and reading. A member of Mexico's national association of artists (Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte), Esquinca lives in Guadalajara.

is a Peruvian poet, scholar, and literary activist. He is Professor of Latin American Literature in the Department of Romance Languages at Tufts University, President of the International Association of Peruvianists since 1996, and Director of the Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana since 2010. He is considered an expert in Latin American colonial literature, especially in El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and a prominent member of the Peruvian 1980s literary generation.

is a poet and essayist from the Dominican Republic. Author of thirteen books of poems and eight books of essays, he is considered the most important poet of his generation and the founder of the style of "poesía del pensar" (poetry of thought). His work has won the Salomé Ureña National Prize for Poetry (2007), the Premio Nacional de Poesía (1987), the Premio de Poesía Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1992), the Premio Casa de Teatro (1994) and was the finalist for the Premio Internacional "Eliseo Diego" (1994).

(1922–2010) was the author of many novels, among them Blindness, All the Names, Baltasar and Blimunda, and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

was born in Lausanne in 1954. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, and she has won two prestigious Swiss literary awards: the Ramuz Prize for Errer mortelle and the Schiller Prize for Hangars. She works as an editor and scholar at the Centre de Recherches sur les Lettres Romandes at the University of Lausanne. In John Taylor's translations, her poetry has appeared in the Antioch Review, the International Literary Quarterly, and Carte Blanche.

was born in Lausanne in 1954. She is the author of five volumes of poetry and has won two prestigious Swiss literary awards: the Ramuz Prize for Errer mortelle and the Schiller Prize for Hangars. She works as an editor and scholar at the Centre de Recherches sur les Lettres Romandes at the University of Lausanne. In John Taylor's translations, her poetry has appeared in the Antioch Review, the International Literary Quarterly, and Carte Blanche.

(1953) is one of Austria's most distinguished contemporary writers. For his obsessively detailed and intricately constructed treatments of village life, marked by the constant irruption of themes of homosexuality, betrayal, and death, he has been awarded the Great Austrian State Prize, the Ingeborg Bachmann prize, and the Georg Büchner prize, among others. His most recent book is Die Realität so sagen, als ob sie trotzdem nicht wär oder Die Wutausbrüche der Engel.

(born 1985) is a graduate of the Danish Writers' School and is a major voice of Scandinavian literature. She made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stigninger og fald (Rise and Fall), which was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. A year later, Klougart was awarded the Danish Crown Prince Couple's Stardust Prize, the committee calling her "one of the most important writers, not just of her generation, but of her time." Her second novel, Hallerne (The Halls), published in 2011, was adapted for the stage at Aarhus Theatre in February 2012 by Swedish director Annika Silkeberg. In February 2012, Klougart published her third novel, Én af os sover (One of Us is Sleeping), for which she again received a Nordic Council Literature Prize nomination. Her fourth novel, Om Mørke (On Darkness), appeared in 2014 to massive critical acclaim throughout Scandinavia.

is a columnist and historical writer whose previous works include The President's Relatives, Taiwan's First Taste of Western Civilization, No. 90, Miyamaecho and Everyone is an Era unto Himself, Tales of Taiwanese Happiness and Olden Times.

is a poet.

(1930- ) was born of Jewish Ukrainian parents in Buenos Aires and grew up amid a myriad of languages, acquiring a fascination for words early on in life. With the publication of Cólera buey (Oxen Rage, 1965/71), his strange blending of social engagement and wordplay expressed in a colloquial language marked an unnerving irony and poignancy that would continue to characterize his poetry, which now includes more than 20 titles. After actively participating in the movements that brought back Perón in 1973, he was sent to Europe in 1975 to work in public relations as a journalist. After the military coup of 1976, he remained in exile in Europe, denouncing human rights abuses, which by August of that year involved the personal loss of his son, Marcelo, and his pregnant daughter-in-law, who were "disappeared" during the military dictatorship. Recipient of numerous prizes including the prestigious Premio Cervantes, Gelman is considered to be one of Latin America's foremost poets. Having worked as a journalist and a translator in Argentina, Spain, France, and Italy, he is presently living in Mexico City.

(1937–2001) is one of Lithuania's leading poets from the second half of the twentieth century. She graduated from Vilnius University in 1959 and spent most of her life in Vilnius. She published over twenty books of poetry as well as translations, books for children, and plays. She worked as an editor for several leading literary journals in Lithuania. Her poetry has been translated into several languages, including English, German, and Russian. Her work has garnered numerous prizes, including the Lithuanian Writers' Union Prize in 2000 and the national award of the Gediminas Cross in 1997. Kristalas (Crystal), a selected volume, was published posthumously in 2010 by the Lithuanian Writers' Union.

(Acapulco, 1971) is a Mexican poet, essayist, short story writer, and novelist, as well as the frontman of the rock band Madrastras. He has published seven poetry collections, which have won various national and international prizes, a book of essays on contemporary Mexican poetry, and three short story collections, among them the acclaimed Cocaína. Manual de usuario (Cocaine: A User´s Manual). His work has been translated into various languages, including German, French, Portuguese, and Catalan. Canción de Tumba (Tomb Song), his second novel, was published in 2011. That year it won the Premio Jaén de Novela in Spain, and in 2012 it won the Premio Iberoamericano de Novela Elena Poniatowska in Mexico.

is the author of the novel, The Gospel of Anarchy and the story collection, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever. With the poet Jeremy Schmall he edits The Agriculture Reader, a limited edition arts annual. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and online here.

(1971-1995) was a comic strip artist and writer for the weekly magazine BH Dani in Sarajevo. During the war he hosted a radio show on Radio Wall, Sarajevo, called Joseph and His Brothers. He was killed in Sarajevo at the age of 24 in August 1995 by sniper fire only three months before the Dayton Peace Accords brought an end to the fighting. His stories and the transcripts of his radio shows were lovingly assembled in the book, The Secret of Raspberry Jam, by his friends and colleagues, and were produced for the stage in a play of the same name by theater director Selma Spahić.

is the author of a poetry collection, Bearings (HarperCollins India, 2009). She was born in India, lives in Paris, and works as a producer in performing arts. This proximity to performing arts, and to dance, in particular, is refracted in much of her poetry, which has been published in several anthologies and journals including Indian Literature, Caravan India, Mediterranean Poetry, Terre à Ciel, Penguin's 60 Indian Poets and the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, The Literary Review and The Poetry Review. Her poems have been translated into French and Italian. Naïr co-scripted British-Bangladeshi choreographer Akram Khan's piece, Desh – which won the 2012 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production. Young Zubaan (India) and Editions Hélium (France) will soon be bringing out The Boy, the Bees and Bonbibi, one of the stories she wrote for Desh, as a children's book illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet. She is currently working on her next collection for HarperCollins, an account of the Mahabharata war in 18 voices.

(1966) recently celebrated the twentieth anniversary of her poetic debut Dagene skifter hænder (The Days Change Hands) with another collection of poetry, Et sted i verden (A Place to Be, 2014). Guldager's fiction has a characteristic simplicity and clarity, and her novels, various collections of poetry and short stories have earned her much critical acclaim as 'one of the most original voices of contemporary Danish fiction.' She is a graduate of the renowned Writer's School in Copenhagen and holds an M.A. in literature from University of Copenhagen. Guldager's works have been translated into Swedish, Norwegian, and German. Her first collection of short stories, København (Gyldendal, 2004) was published in English in 2011 (Copenhagen, BookThug, Toronto).

received his doctorate in 2012 from the University of London for research on literature and the Lebanese of Mexico. He is from Sacramento, California, and is not Lebanese or Mexican. After time at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin he decided to immigrate. For his visa, he opened up Redwood, a cocktail bar in Berlin's Mitte district. His writings have been published in the journals Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Romance Studies, the Times Literary Supplement, Red Wheelbarrow, and Beloit Poetry Journal.

is one of the most prominent poets of South Korea. She lives in Seoul and teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Kim's works in English include: When the Plug Gets Unplugged (Tinfish, 2005), Anxiety of Words (Zephyr, 2006), Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (Action Books, 2008), All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (Action Books, 2011), and Princess Abandoned (Tinfish, 2012).

(born 1957) has successfully juggled the life of a salaried man and that of a poet for the past twenty years. In his poetry Kim focuses on human physicality and the relationship between the body and the violence inflicted upon it. He believes that fear and compulsion are integral parts of the human body. Because of this, Kim has been described as "an observer of minute and microscopic details." His major works include Fatal Sleep (1991), Storm in the Eye of a Needle (1994), Office Worker (1999), Cow (2005), Chewing Gum (2009), Splitting, Splitting (2012), and El Chicle, a Spanish translation published in Mexico (2012). He is the recipient of the Kim Soo-young, Hyundai, and Midang literary awards, among others. He teaches poetry writing at Kyung Hee Cyber University, Seoul.

won the Seoul Newspaper Spring Literary Contest for Poetry in 2003, then for several years he wrote pornographic novels and provided services as a ghost writer. Later he released his first collection of poems, I Am A Season That Does Not Exist. He has written and translated over 10 books of poetry, essays, and plays. His work is heavily anthologized in Korea. He has been the recipient of many prestigious awards. In 2008 his poem "The Pattern Of The Knee" won the Writers' Pick for best poem of the year, an award judged by peers in the field of poetry. In 2009 he was awarded Today's Young Artist Prize by the Korean government and the Kim Su-Young Literature Prize. Kim Kyung Ju lives in Seoul.

made her literary debut in 2001 in Poesie. Her books include three poetry collections, A Stain in the Shape of a Star (2005), Cheer up, Femme Fatale (2007), Inexpressible Love (2011), and a novel, Blood Sisters (2011). She won the first Poetry and the World Literary Award (2010) and the Kim Daljin Changwon Literary Award (2011). She received her PhD for her thesis on "Feminist Poems in Korea," and has been teaching at Kyungsang University. In 2012, she stayed at the Free University of Berlin as a writer in residence, participating in the Writer-in-Residence Abroad Program of the Arts Council Korea (ARKO). Action Books plans to publish a forthcoming English translation of her poems. She participates courtesy of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. She is currently working as a columnist for a Busan newspaper and as host of a poetry-themed radio program.

is famous for his electrifying performances. He is revered in Japan where he has been awarded major literary honors including the Rekitei Prize for Young Poets and the prestigious Takami Jun Prize.  His inspired work as a writer, editor, performer, organizer, and critic has altered the landscape of contemporary Japanese literature. Nomura's work is iconoclastic—at once playful and heady, saturated by his interest in philosophy, Japanese shamanism, music and art. Spectacle & Pigsty, a book of his poems translated into English by Kyoko Yoshida & Forrest Gander, is forthcoming from OmniDawn Press in Spring 2011.

was born in 1945 in Aarau and lives in Unterkulm, Switzerland. He has won many literary awards including the Hermann Hesse Prize for Literature, Swiss Schiller Foundation Poetry Prize and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize in 2012. He has published over 30 works of poetry and fiction. His latest novel is The Argentinian (Der Argentinier, Haymon, 2009) and his most recent collection of verse is Out of the Dust (Aus den Staub, Haymon, 2010).

(b. 1964) is a literary critic and commentator for the national Danish newspaper Weekendavisen. He also hosts a radio show about literature for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, DR. He is the author of several essay collections about literature and culture, and he has a new book coming out this fall about representations of the war in Afghanistan in Danish literature and art.

was born in Osaka in 1962. He is a writer, musician, and poet who has a rare mix of both cult and mass appeal. He started playing music in high school under the stage name Machizo Machida, and he made his vocalist debut in the punk band INU, which won acclaim for their first album Meshi Kuuna!, in 1981. His first literary work, Kūge, which includes poetry, was published in 1992, and his first novel, Kussun Daikoku, published in 1996, received the Noma Literary Prize and the Bunkamura Deux Magots Literary Award. He won the 123rd Akutagawa Prize with Kiregire in 2000, and the Tanizaki Prize with Kokuhaku in 2005. An English translation of his novel Punk Samurai Slash Down was published in April 2014. Machida currently lives in Atami, Shizuoka, with seven cats. His website can be found here.

was born in 1933. He is a world-famous figure, and has published more than 140 volumes of poetry and other writings, including the monumental, 30-volume Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives) series. His work has been translated into every major language. An edition of English translations of poems selected from the first ten Maninbo volumes was published by Green Integer in 2005 under the title Ten Thousand Lives and Flowers of a Moment was published by BOA in 2006. A new edition of his Zen poems What? was published by Parallax Press in early 2008. A full selection of his poems, Songs for Tomorrow, was published by Green Integer late in 2008. His Himalaya Poems are to be published soon by Green Integer. Click here for his website.

(born Kou Tenki) is a writer, sculptor, the president of the Taipei Haiku Association, and has the distinction of being the last living Japanese-language writer in Taiwan. Born in Tainan in 1928 when the country was under Japanese rule, Kou received his education in Japanese. While many Taiwanese writers who wrote in Japanese made their literary debut during WWII, Kou began writing in Japanese only after the war ended, at the age of 17. His output includes haiku, tanka, modern poetry, novels, and criticism, but these works have remained unpublished for decades ever since public use of Japanese was forbidden in Taiwan in 1945.

In 1970, Kou founded the Taipei Haiku Association and started publishing private editions of his works, despite censorship under the Nationalist Party's rule. Known for their wit, pathos, and humour, his works are now attracting new readers among the post-war generation, wining several prizes such as the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Grand Prize (Japan, 2004), The Order of the Rising Sun (Japan, 2006), and the 台湾文学牛津奨 (Taiwan, 2006).

(b. 1948) is the author of eight collections of poetry and eighteen plays, the artistic director of the Brynnsgatan Fyra theatre in Stockholm, Sweden, and a member of the Swedish Academy, the body responsible for choosing the Nobel Prize in Literature.  She's also the winner of the Selma Lagerlöf Literature Prize (1999) and the Bellman Prize (2003).

is one of the most highly acclaimed Hungarian poets. She is the winner of several awards, including the Graves Prize (1996), the Déry Tibor Prize (1996), and the József Attila Prize (2000), and her poetry has been translated into many languages. Since the publication of her first collection of short stories in 2006, she has been listed among the best contemporary writers of Central Europe, and much of her poetry has been widely translated. She was recently awarded the Laureate Prize, one of the highest recognitions in Hungarian literature.

Her poems have strong connections with Hungarian and other European poetic traditions (she translates French poetry). Typically, her poems subtly combine strong visual elements, intellectual reflection and a very empathetic, yet often ironic, concern for everyday scenes, conflicts, and people.

is the author of two collections of poetry, Ellipsis and The Anagram, a treatise on violence and the Iliad entitled Perang, Langit dan Dua Perempuan (War, Heaven and Two Women), short stories in The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art, and four editions of the award-winning and bestselling Jakarta Good Food Guide. She also translated Goenawan Mohamad's Selected Poems and On God and Other Unfinished Things and wrote the preface to Not a Muse: International Anthology of Women's Poetry. She is also a co-founder of Aksara Bookstore in Jakarta, and was Indonesia's representative at the Poetry Parnassus/Cultural Olympiad, held in conjunction with the London Olympics. Her debut novel, Amba, is a national bestseller and was published in English under the title The Question of Red. She has just published her second novel, Aruna dan Lidahnya (Aruna and Her Palate).

lives in Hue, Vietnam. She has worked as a reporter and a literary editor, and serves as an Executive Board Member of the Vietnamese Writers' Association. She has published six collections of poems and three books for children in Vietnam, and has won several major prizes for poetry. Green Rice, a bilingual collection of her poems with translations by Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh, was published by Curbstone in 2005.

(Madrid, 1962) is the author of Del amor o del agua (Bitácora, 1993), Travesía del olvido (Hiperión, 1998), y Verbigracia (Excitos, 2001), and El ángel fumador (La Isla de Siltolá, 2012). She is the coauthor of a translation of Cyrano de Bergerac and the playwright of the work for theater El sueño de la libertad, performed in the Senghor Cultural Center in Brussels 2002. Her work has received various literary awards and recognitions, which include the Hiperión Poetry Prize and the Madrid Book Fair Prize. She currently resides in Brussels where she translates for the European Commission and contributes a weekly column in the newspaper Abc.

was born in Gyula, Hungary in 1954. He worked for some years as an editor until 1984, when he became a freelance writer. He now lives in reclusiveness in the hills of Szentlászló. He has written five novels and won numerous prizes, including the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in Fiction for Satantango. In 1993, he won the Best Book of the Year Award in Germany for The Melancholy of Resistance. For more about him, visit his extensive website here.

is a contemporary poet living in Ho Chi Minh City whose work is censored in Vietnam due to its content. He is a founding member of the underground Mở Miệng (Open [Your] Mouth) group, and has been published in online journals and in group samizdat. His own samizdat are Bảy biến tấu con nhện (Seven Spider Improvisations, 2004), Trường chay thịt chó (Dogmeat Vegetarianism, 2005), and Khi Kẻ Thù Ta Buồn Ngủ (When Our Enemy Falls Asleep, 2010). A chapbook of his work has been translated into English by American poet Linh Dinh, excerpts of which were published in the journal Soft Targets. Recently, Đợi has been publishing exclusively online because of pressure from the Vietnamese government.

is a Korean poet. Her poems have appeared in reputable Korean literary journals such as Literature and Society (문학과사회) and Modern Literature (현대문학). Her first book of poems, When Someone Stays Too Long (너무 오래 머물렀을 때), was published by Moonji Publishing in 2005. She also wrote Hyewha-dong La bohème (혜화동 라보엠), a free modern adaptation of Puccini's La bohème, which was performed by the Progressive Opera Studio in 2009.

was born in Beijing and grew up in Hong Kong. She has been involved with documentary filmmaking, arts and media education, and grassroots activism for the past decade. She is currently the director of Hong Kong video arts organisation, V-Artivist (影行者). Her visual works include Home where the Yellow Banners Fly (《黃幡翻飛處》), Walk on! Shun Ning Road (《順寧道．走下去》), Iron Born Roses (《紥草根.鐵生花》) and the street, the way (《街.道–給「我們」的情書》) etc. Lee Wai-Yi was the first-prize winner of the Unitas Fiction Writing Award for New Writers (聯合文學小說新人獎) in 2000. Recent books include A Hard Journey (《行路難》), Incense Tree (《沉香》) and Notes on Nighttime Walks (《短衣夜行紀》).

is the founding editor of Asymptote. He is the author of three hypertexts, one of which won the James Assatly Memorial Prize for Fiction (Brown University). Currently based in Taipei, he has published in The New York Times, Words Without Borders and DIAGRAM, among others.

is at work on Naipaul's Country, a novel of human transformation. His first play, Che!, ran in New York for thirteen months, followed by Blue Soap, a musical. A former staff writer for Manhattan's East Village Other (EVO), he has been published in Evergreen Review and Atlantic Monthly (a cover-story interview with Ralph Ellison). His essay on the Haitian earthquake (www.servinghousejournal.com) was nominated as one of the best online essays in the US (2010-2011).

He is the author of 5 books of poetry & co-author of Garden of Hope, a memoir. In Copenhagen, he is associated with www.desarts.dk, www.2020visions.dk, www.artmoney.dk, and www.copenhagenartclub.dk, where he is art critic. With New York composer Carman Moore, Lennox is in the early stages of developing Waiting for Obama, a musical, and he also appears in Winter Tales: Men Write About Aging (Serving House Books (2011), with Robert Gover, Norman Mailer, Mario Vargas Llosa & others.

was born in Singapore in 1979. He studied Sociology and English Literature at the National University of Singapore, graduating at length with First Class Honours. His work has appeared in a variety of places, including Ceriph, the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, the anthology Love Gathers All, and his own site, which can be found here. He is also a translator of classical poetry into English; his translated work also includes The Song of Songs and the Laozi Daodejing. This Mortal World, his first collection of poems, is in press.

The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji is available for download in ebook format here.

was born in New York in 1943, raised in Paris by her American family, and she writes in French. After studying philosophy, history, and psychology she spent two years working in a factory and participated in the May 1968 movement in Paris. She has been publishing since 1982, when her book L'Excès-l'usine first appeared.

is among Russia's most well-known contemporary writers and one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism. He has been called a "Postmodern Chekhov." His work is conceived as series of index cards, a poetic medium which he was inspired to create through his work as a librarian at the Lenin Library. His work circulated through samizdat and underground readings in the "unofficial" art scene and found wide publication in the late 1980s. Rubinstein lives in Moscow and writes cultural criticism for independent media. The Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2014. He is active in the pro-democracy movement in Russia.

is the pen name of Shih Shu-tuan (b. 1952) and is one of the most prolific and innovative writers on the contemporary Chinese-language literary scene. Over the past forty years, she has published more than a dozen novels and collections of short stories, including The Butcher's Wife (1983), Everyone Sticks His Incense in the Beijing Burner (1997), and A Romance Across Seven Incarnations (2009). She has consistently challenged her readers to confront sociocultural issues and taboos that range from gender, sexuality, ethics, and domestic violence, to government atrocity, identity politics, and rampant consumerism.

In 2004, she received the Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres award from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, and in 2011, one of her short stories was adapted into an award-nominated theatrical production performed by Tanztheater des Staatstheaters Darmstadt, Germany. Earlier this year, Li Ang was selected to be featured in the Contemporary Chinese Writers Project at MIT, and she is the featured writer in the Fall 2011 issue of the prestigious new journal Chinese Literature Today.

was born in Shanghai in 1961. He moved to Sweden in 1988 to study contemporary Swedish literature at Stockholm University. In 1989, he published a book of poems in Swedish called Visions in Water, and subsequently published Escape (1994), Return (1995), You Are My Home (1999), and Origin (2007), among other poetry collections. He has won many poetry awards, including the 2008 Sweden Daily's Award for Literature and the inaugural Clock Kingdom Award. In addition to introducing Chinese poetry to Swedish readers, he has also translated Tomas Tranströmer's complete works into Chinese.

is a Chinese author, reporter, musician, and poet. He is a critic of the Chinese regime, for which he has been imprisoned, and the majority of his writings are banned in China. Liao is the author of The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up. In 2003, he received a Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett grant, and in 2007, he received a Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Center.

is an Argentinean poet who has been living in New York since 1985. She is the author of the poetry collections, Abrete sésamo debajo del agua (1993); Usted (1998); Guardianes del secreto (2002, 2012), translated into English as Guardians of the Secret (2009); Malvas orquídeas del mar (2004), translated into English as Mauve-Sea Orchids (2007); Rasgado (2006); El rumor de los bordes (2011); Diario de la hamaca paraguaya (2014); Materia blanda (2014); and, in collaboration with artist Martin Reyna, La couleur de l'eau / El color del agua (2008). She has written for the art catalogs, Heidi McFall (Aninna Nosei Gallery, 1995) and Alessandro Twombly (Alain Noirhomme Gallery, 2007). She is the creative editor of Xul Solar and Jorge Luis Borges: The Art of Friendship (2012). She has authored the book-length essay Gabriela Mistral: Una mujer sin rostro (2002). From 2009 to 2012 she directed NYU's M.F.A. creative writing in Spanish program, and since 2003 she has been curating the KJCC Poetry Series at New York University. From 2009 to 2012 she directed the NYU M.F.A. in creative writing in Spanish, where she continues to teach. In 2007 she was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow for poetry, and in Spring 2010 she was awarded a residency at the Millay Colony.

was born in the Western Sahara in 1973. In 1982 he arrived in Cuba, a land he would come to embrace. He went on to study journalism before returning to the refugee camps of Tindouf, where he collaborated on Sahrawi National Radio. He is a member of the Generación de la Amistad saharaui, and his poems have appeared in the anthologies Añoranza (2003) and Bubisher (2003). He has also published a collection of his own, Los versos de la madera (2004). He lives in Barcelona.

(1962-1996) is a Taiwanese avant-gardist who published several collections of poetry and prose in his relatively short lifetime, picking up more than 30 awards for his oeuvre. Acclaimed especially for his poetry and his criticism, the talented Lin also wrote fiction and essays of great wit and imagination, the best of which call to mind Ballard and Robbe-Grillet. Unfortunately, some of the latter has been left to neglect.《迷宫零件》(Parts of a Maze, 1993) from which "HOTEL" is taken, for example, is now out of print.

has written the story collection Las Infantas (1998), and the novels Póstuma (2000), Cercada (2000), Fruta Podrida (2007), and Sangre en el Ojo (2012), among other works of fiction, articles, and essays. She has received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz literary prize (Mexico 2012) and the Anna Seghers prize (Berlin 2011), and has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation (2004) and the National Endowment for the Arts (2010). She currently teaches world literature and Latin American culture at New York University.

was born in Henan province, China in 1958. His award-winning short stories have explored life in China's state-owned companies and bureacratic offices, but his most celebrated novel, My Name is Liu Yuejin, tells the story of a migrant worker who has his bag (containing all his worldly possessions) stolen in Beijing. Liu's cold humor, his broad familiarity with the many facets of urban society, and his modern sensibilities have made him a favorite among Chinese readers.

is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing and the director of the Creative and Professional Writing Program at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions and Chinese Face / Off: The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong. He is currently working on a book about ethnic minority cinema in China.

is a migrant worker in Singapore. She hails from the Philippines.

(1809-1886) was an infantry general of Polish extraction living in St. Petersburg. He devoted what little spare time he had to writing a series of increasingly bizarre novellas, mostly centered around the character of Mr. Pantofel (the surname literally means 'slipper,' which to the Polish minds evokes such idioms as 'under the slipper,' which means 'tied to the apron-strings'), a mystical/psychological/philosophical treatise entitled On Animal Magnetism, which attempted to explain the inner workings of the human soul, and a French-language typology of women entitled l'Hymen. As a general, his literary activity was rather awkward publicity, so he published the majority of his manuscripts under his wife's name (Eleonora Sztyrmer).

is widely considered to be Spain's most prominent contemporary poet. He has written over forty books of poetry, novels, and essays, and is the recipient of the Adonáis Prize, the Loewe Prize, the Spanish National Literature Prize, and the Spanish National Critics Prize. Along with his active work in the literary sphere, he is a prominent voice of Spain's political left and recently helped found the party Open Left (Izquierda Abierta). He has been writing and publishing in Granada for over three decades.

(1910-1992) was one of the most distinctive voices of post-war Spanish poetry. He won the Cervantes Prize in 1982.

is widely acknowledged as one of the major German poets of his generation. He was born in 1963 in Gera, a town in the eastern part of the state of Thuringia in the former German Democratic Republic. He underwent training as a mason and a carpenter and completed mandatory military service. After studying in Halle and Berlin, in 1997 he became the literary director and occupant of the Peter Huchel Museum outside of Potsdam, the most recent caretaker in a line extending from the poet Huchel himself (who permanently left the GDR in 1971) to the poet and translator Erich Arendt. Mr. Seiler has published over six volumes of poetry, short-stories and essays. His many prizes include the Dresden Poetry Prize (2000), the Bremen Prize for Literature (2004), the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (2007), and, most recently, the Fontane Prize (2010). He was writer-in-residence at the German Academy in Rome in 2010 and at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles in 2003. In addition, he has been elected a member of the Saxon Academy of the Arts, Dresden, and the Academy of Arts, Berlin. in field latin is his most recent book of poetry.

is Ukrainian and is recognized as one of the most imaginative playwrights in Russia today. He is the recipient of the Boldest Experiment of the Year award from the Moskovsky Komsomolets daily for Kitchen; the Moscow New Drama award for the futuristic comedy Titus the Irreproachable; and the Russian Anti-Booker award for experimenting with new avenues in drama. In Afisha magazine, Russian critic Yelena Kovalskaya named Kitchen one of the top 20 plays in Russia in the first decade of the century. Translations of Repress and Excite (2007) and Vodka, Fucking, and Television (2003) appeared in TheatreForum magazine. A translation of The Schooling of Bento Bonchev was workshopped at Towson University in 2010 and opened at the Breaking String Theater in Austin, TX, in March 2012. It was published in the Performing Arts Journal. Titus the Irreproachable, translated by Noah Birksted-Breen, was a featured reading at the Russian Theatre Festival in London in February 2010. John Hanlon's translation of Mooncrazed was presented at the HotINK festival at NYU in January 2010.

is a seminal contemporary Chinese poet and co-founder of Jintian (Today), the first unofficial literary journal to be published in the People's Republic of China. He is a painter as well as a poet and has also published fiction. A volume of his selected poems in English translation, October Dedications, is forthcoming from Zephyr and Chinese University Press. He lives in Songzhuang, outside Beijing.

is the author of Cuaderno de los sueños (2009) and Versos robados y otros juegos (2003, 2nd ed. 2005). Iris won the 2009 Mérida National Poetry Award and second place in the 2003 Rosario Castellanos National Poetry Award. He is now a doctoral candidate in the Romance Languages Department of the University of Cincinnati.

is a Galician-language poet and critical theorist. She has published several books of poetry, including Os hemisferios (2006), Eu non son de aquí (2008); with Daniel Salgado, A Guerra (2013); and Os inocentes (2014).

was born in Cuba in 1977. He belongs to a generation of writers who came of age in Havana during the island's "Special Period" of severe post-Soviet economic crisis. His poetic prose operates in fragments and reflects influences ranging from international literature to readings in history and philosophy. Dedicated to the slow development of his books, Morales has earned many of his literary awards for segments of larger works in progress. For example, excerpts that would come together to form his 2006 poetry collection El mundo como objeto won the 2004 poetry prize presented by La Gaceta de Cuba, as well as an honorable mention in the national Julián del Casal prize competition and a coveted finalist position in the international Casa de las Américas competition. Morales is also the author of the poetry collections Cinema (1997, Pinos Nuevos prize) and Materia (2009, Julián del Casal prize), among others. His novel La espiral appeared in 2006. Morales edited and wrote the introduction to Como un huésped de la noche, an anthology of poetry by Roberto Branly, published in 2010.

was born in 1956 and is one of Poland's most acclaimed and versatile contemporary writers. His books include the novels Terminal and Tworki, as well as nonfiction works on such diverse subjects as European visual culture, wine, and Romantic melancholy. A prolific translator from French, he teaches at the Institute for Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and lives in Warsaw.

was born in Cartagena, Colombia and lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has published three story collections: Hay ciertas cosas que una no puede hacer descalza (2009), Las personas normales son muy raras (2011), and Orquídeas (2012), and two novels: Hasta que pase un huracán (2012) and Lo que no aprendí (2013). Her books have been published in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Spain, and Italy.

In 2008, the magazine Cambio chose her as one of the top fifty leaders in Colombia. In 2012, the Colombian government named her as one of the one hundred most successful Colombians abroad. In 2013, the Fundación Han Nefkens and the Universidad Pompeu Fabra awarded her with a grant for literary creation. She is currently the executive director of the Fundación Tomás Eloy Martínez.

(Chris Tanasescu) is a poet, academic, translator, and poetry performer whose pen-name is also the name of his poetry/action painting/jazz-rock band, winner of a number of significant national and international awards. He splits his time between Europe, South-East Asia, and North America, lecturing, performing, and assembling an international graph-poem, a communal work that poets from all over the world contribute to, following the principles of mathematical/internet graphs and the spirit of the jam session.

(b. 1973, Buenos Aires) is sub-editor of Radar, the weekly cultural supplement of the newspaper Página 12. She has contributed to magazines such as Rolling Stone, La Mano, Dulce Equis Negra, and La Mujer de mi Vida. She has published three novels: Bajar es lo peor (Espasa Calpe, 1995), Cómo desaparecer completamente (Emecé, 2004), and Chicos que vuelven (Eduvim, 2011), and one story collection, Los peligros de fumar en la cama. Her latest book of chronicles, Alguien camina sobre tu tumba: Mis viajes a cementerios was published in 2013, and her newest book, entitled La hermana menor: un retrato de Silvina Ocampo, was just published in 2014.

(1948-2007) was born in Weiz, Austria, and died in Vienna. Author of four novels, including the monumental unfinished masterpiece Naturgemäß, she was the recipient of numerous honors in her lifetime, among them the Robert Walser Prize and the Literary Prize of the City of Vienna.

writes both fiction and non-fiction. She lives in Amsterdam with video artist Jaap de Ruig. Her early years were spent in Veenhuizen, a secluded village nicknamed 'Dutch Siberia.' A thousand inhabitants and a thousand inmates lived there, surrounded by 'No Trespassing' signs. Mariët studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Groningen and has published six novels. One of them, Bokkezang ("Buck Song") was translated into Russian. Her non-fiction book Sla een spijker in mijn hart ("Drive a Nail Through My Heart") is about her experiences among the Roma in Romania. Her latest book, De mythische oom ("The Mythical Uncle"), was published in January 2012. The protagonist is her expatriate uncle, who lives in a small American town where half the population is of Dutch descent. At the moment, Meester has returned temporarily to the prison village of her childhood. She is currently writing two new books about the village, one of them a novel.

(b. 1932) is a prolific and prize-winning French poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and Professor Emerita of French literature at the Sorbonne (Université de Paris-IV). Her most recent book of poems, Violente vie, was published by Le Castor Astral in 2012. She lives in Paris.

is a poet and translator. Her two books of poetry in Russian are Край земли and Колючий свет. Her works regularly appear in literary journals in Russia, the United States, and Israel. Her book of children's verse in English is coming out this summer. She emigrated from Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), Russia and currently lives in Boston, USA.

founded the Tire pas la Nappe Company with Marion Guerrero and Capucine Ducastelle in 1997. That year, the company staged her first play, Petite pièce médicament, and has since staged most of her plays. Aubert has also been commissioned by the Comédie Française, The Rond-Point Theatre in Paris, and the National Theatre Centre in Vire, among many other companies and directors. Recent works include Débâcles, une pièce française; La Nouvelle; Essai sur le désordre entre génération; and Rendez-vous, tentatives de détournements d'un quartier montpelliérain. Her plays have been translated into German, English, Italian, Czech, and Catalan. Aubert is on the reading committee at the Rond-Point Theatre in Paris, a member of the writing department at ENSATT, and a founding member of the Playwrights' Cooperative, initiated by Fabrice Melquiot. She is writer in residence at the Théâtre Jacques Cœur in Lattes and at the Scènes du Jura, a national theatre centre in Lons-le-Saunier, and has also acted in several plays.

(1959), was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and studied social sciences at the University of Leiden and theatre at the School for Theatre in Amsterdam. She has written for different media, such as theatre, radio, film, and opera. Her breakthrough came with the play I, Zeeland girl (Prix Europe 2002). After that, the plays Motel Texel, Loubna!Loubna!, Motherland, Little story about my brother and me and our sister in the woods, Beautiful Anna; a fado from Zeeland were to follow. Her work has been translated into English, German and different Scandinavian languages. Most of her plays were chosen as the official Dutch submissions to international festivals. In 2010 six of her plays were published as Monologues, 5 texts for young women and 1 for an old one.

Marjolein Bierens teaches at the Amsterdam Writers' School and the Postgraduate School of Amsterdam. For script queries, please visit her website here, or contact her at marjoleinbierens@gmail.com.

teaches writing and literature at the Ateneo de Manila University, where he edits the literary section of the academic journal Kritika Kultura. He is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and his newer work has appeared in Transit, Copper Nickel, Drunken Boat, Fugue, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Verse Daily. A recipient of a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, he is the author of the poetry books Narcissus (AdMU Press, 2011), Shall we be kind and suffer each other (High Chair, 2013), and Except you enthrall me (forthcoming from UP Press).

is a Uruguayan poet. Her The History of Violets was reviewed by Daniel Borzutzky in the Jul 2011 issue.

is a Spanish writer and freelance journalist. In 2012 she won the Premio Las Nuevas Plumas (The New Quills Prize) for her chronicle La gran mudanza. In 2014, she won the Premio Don Quijote del Periodismo (The Don Quijote Journalism Prize) with her essay La lluvia es una cosa que sucede en el pasado. Martina has lived in Paris, Barcelona, and various countries in Latin America. Her work has been published in Etiqueta Negra (Peru), Fronterad (Spain), Letras Libres (Mexico and Spain), and Popoli (Italy). She is the author of the blog Entre viajes y letras.

is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica, as well as the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don't Cry. Her story "Secretary" was the basis for the feature film of the same name. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. In 2002, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. She has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, Brown, and Syracuse University. Her novel Veronica was nominated for the National Book Award in 2005; it was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Award. She is currently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.

is the author of six books of poems, including Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her translation of Dante's Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, was published by Graywolf Press in 2012. She is a professor of English and creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.

is a mathematician and essayist. Born in Manchuria and raised in Tokyo, Japan, he obtained his PhD in Mathematics at Tokyo University. After stints at the University of Colorado and at Cambridge University, he became a full professor at Ochanomizu University, Tokyo. In 2010, he became Professor Emeritus, post-retirement. Fujiwara won the Nihon Essayist Club Prize for his 1977 debut Wakaki Sugakusha no America (Days of a Young Mathematician in America) and has since followed up with many publications, including the 2005 best-seller Kokka no Hinkaku (The Dignity of the Nation), of which more than 2 million copies have been sold in Japan. His latest writings in Kanken Mogo (Within my scope) now appear serially in the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho. His parents are Naoki Prize-winning novelist Jiro Nitta and best-selling author Tei Fujiwara.

was born in Nagasaki Prefecture in 1962. He started his career in drama in 1990 while a student at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, founding the Jiku Gekijo Company as the writer-director. After disbanding the company in 1997, he has been writing original plays for Seinendan, Bungakuza and other companies as well as some films. His early lyrical plays revolve around quiet personal conversations. Matsuda has received numerous awards, including OMS Drama Award (1994), Kishida Kunio Drama Award (1996), Yomiuri Drama Award (1997), Yomiuri Literature Award (1998), and Kyoto Cultural Encouragement Prize (2000). In 2004, he founded marebito theater company as the writer-director in order to explore the boundaries and possibilities of theater. His recent plays with marebito theater company have taken a dramatic shift for experimentalism, and have been produced in Seoul, China, India, Egypt and the United States, as well as in major Japanese cities. Matsuda was selected as "the most avant-garde and experimental theater artist" in 2009 by Theatre Arts, the leading critical journal of the Japanese theater. He is a visiting professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design.

was born in 1976 in Sant'Elpidio a Mare (Italy). He is a contributing editor for the journals Nuovi Argomenti and Poesia and for the newspaper il manifesto. He has published two collections of poetry: Il mare a destra (Edizioni Atelier, 2004) and L'attimo dopo (Luca Sossella Editore, 2009, Metauro Prize). His poems have been translated into English, Spanish, French, German and Croatian.He has been an Italian Fellow for the Arts of the American Academy in Rome (2006-7), and a Fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Center (2010). After living and working for some years in Pavia and Rome, he's currently teaching at the Italian Institute of the University of Bern (Switzerland). Further information is available on his website.

is a writer of novels, short stories, and essays. Her most recent books include the novels Gips (Cast, 2012) and Priapus (Priapus, 2010), the short story collection Grumme historier (Grim Stories, 2011), and a genre-bending art book, Mæcen søges (Patron Wanted, 2013), which documents her year-long performance of the same name via e-mails, letters, photos and film. Her short fiction has appeared in the US in The Iowa Review, Absinthe, The Chattahoochee Review, and The Literary Review, and her nonfiction in the Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2006 she was awarded the prestigious Three-Year Scholarship from the Danish Arts Foundation. Her father is American, her mother Danish. She lives in Copenhagen, where she is currently at work on a novel. Her website can be viewed here.

is the author of World Enough: poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) and Same Life: poems (FSG, 2008), and two books on British romantic poetry and culture, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (2008) and Romanticism and the Human Sciences (2000), both from Cambridge University Press. An Associate Professor of English at NYU, she has published essays on poetry, fiction, teaching, and sexuality in The New York Times, Boston Review, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and many other venues. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing, she is currently a contributing editor at Boston Review. Her book, My Poets, is forthcoming from FSG in 2012.

is the author of numerous volumes of poetry perfumed with the bitter flowers of Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Classic Rock, both new and old. He has resided in Mexico City since 2004, where he listens to jazz, smokes unapologetically, walks his dogs and works as a waiter. He currently has several multidisciplinary poetic and visual projects in the works.

is a poet, critic, editor, and translator. He is among the last generation of Russian poets to grow up in the Soviet Union. The recipient of numerous national awards, including the Moscow Reckoning Award, the Anti-Booker, the Novyi Mir Prize, and the Bunin Prize, his work has been translated into over a dozen languages. In 2013 Amelin won the prestigious Solzhenitsyn Prize for his contributions to Russian poetry. The author of three books of poetry, including Холодные оды (Cold Odes, 1996), Dubia (1999), and Конь Горгоны (The Horse of the Gorgon, 2003), as well as a collection of prose and poems, Гнутая речь (Bent Speech, 2011), he is also an accomplished translator of Pindar, Catullus, Homer, and other ancient and contemporary poets. He currently lives in Moscow. He is a member of the Russian PEN-Club and editor-in-chief at OGI, a leading publisher of contemporary literature.

is an assistant professor of history at Stetson University and teaches and researches the cultural history of Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe. She focuses in particular on the intersection of governance and creativity, especially in multi-ethnic places. She has presented at many conferences, has several publications in edited volumes and journals, and is writing a book, Beau Monde: State and Stage at Empire's Edge, Russia and Soviet Ukraine 1916-1941, based on her dissertation (Princeton, 2011). She translates from various Slavic languages, occasionally writes for New Eastern Europe, and was formerly a professional actress. She has taught at Princeton University, the Ukrainian Catholic University, and the University of Toronto, as well as at a summer school of Jewish history in Lviv, Ukraine.

was born in 1978, in Turkey. He studied Physics at Sakarya University. His first poem, "Yıldırımları Beklemek", published in Varlık magazine in 1999. Erte's poems, short stories, essays and interviews have been published in various magazines such as Varlık, Kitap-lık, Yasakmeyve.  Erte is the recipient of 2003 Yaşar Nabi Nayır Poetry Award with his manuscript Suyu Bulandıran Şey which was turned into a book in the same year. His first short story book, Bakışın Kirlettiği Ayna, and his second book of poetry, Alçalma, came out in 2008 and 2010, respectively.  Currently he works as an editor at Varlık Publishing House.

(born 1978) is a contemporary Turkish poet-writer. He completed his undergraduate studies in Physics at Sakarya University. His first poem, "Yıldırımları Beklemek" (Awaiting the Lightenings), was published in the literary journal Varlık in 1999. Erte's poems, short stories, essays, and interviews have been published in various literary journals such as Varlık, Kitap-lık, and Yasakmeyve. In 2003, Erte's poetry collection, Suyu Bulandıran Şey (What Muddies the Water), won the Yaşar Nabi Nayır Poetry Award and was published as a book. His first short story collection, Bakışın Kirlettiği Ayna (The Mirror Smeared by the Looking) (May 2008), his second poetry collection, Alçalma (Humbling) (February 2010), and his first novel, Sahte (Fake) (June 2012), were published by Yapı Kredi Yayınları (YKY). He is currently working as an editor at Varlık Publishing House.

(b. 1972) is a Panamanian author and a professional musician. She holds a degree in Psychology and a Master's in Music Therapy. Taylor writes poetry and prose and her works include Tiempos Acuáticos, Amables Predicciones, Microcosmos, Camino a Mariato, and Atrapasueños. In 2009, she was awarded the Central American Rafaela Contreras prize for women writing short fiction for her collection Camino a Mariato (the Spanish original of "The Voyage" can be found in this collection). She has received additional recognitions for her poetry, flash fiction, and children's writing.

(1915-2002) was one of the four most important poets of Turkey's post-independence era. Along with Orhan Veli and Oktay Rifat, he established the "Garip," or "Strange" movement, which completed the work of breaking with the Ottoman conventions that had governed Turkish poetry for centuries. During a career that spanned six and a half decades, Melih Cevdet Anday published eleven collections of poems, eight plays, eight novels, and fifteen collections of essays, as well as a book of memoirs.

(October 10, 1908 – April 13, 1983) was a Catalan novelist in the Catalan language.

's poems have appeared in West Branch, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, DIAGRAM, and Boxcar Poetry Review, among others. He was the winner of the 2008 Bechtel Prize from Teachers & Writers Collaborative and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. New poems are forthcoming in Rattle, Bateau, The Los Angeles Review and Sentence. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.

is an Australian poet living in Melbourne. His publications include open sesame (Giramondo) and the thorn with the boy in its side (Oystercatcher). He is a co-editor, with Jill Jones, of Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann); the anthology was launched at Books Actually in Singapore. He has had residencies in Japan, Slovenia, and, most recently, Italy. His poems have been translated into German, Italian, Slovene, French, and Japanese.

has published six books of poetry: Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), Acrimony (1986), K.S. in Lakeland: New and Selected Poems (1990), Corona, Corona (1993), Approximately Nowhere (1999), and Selected Poems (2009). With James Lasdun, he edited the influential anthology After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1994). A selection of his criticism, Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures, was published in 2002. He has edited and introduced short selections of the poems of Robert Lowell (2001) and John Berryman (2003) and has edited the anthology Twentieth Century German Poetry (2006).

Professor Hofmann has translated some seventy books from the German, mainly novels, including works by Hans Fallada, Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, Joseph Roth, and Wim Wenders. His criticism appears regularly in the London Review of Books and Poetry (Chicago).

is Stefan and Lucy Hejna Family Chair in Polish Language and Literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His very long list of book-length publications includes The Politics of Sensibility: An Introduction to the Human Sciences (forthcoming in Polish from Universitas Press), Universal Decomposition: Schulz, Existence, Literature (published in Polish in 2012 by Jagiellonian University Press), essays on European writers from Shakespeare to Pessoa to Kafka collected under the title Where Life Meets Literature (2009; in Polish), as well as the award-winning Black Waters: Gombrowicz, World, Literature (2004; translation into English by Benjamin Paloff underway). An avid traveler and bon vivant, Markowski has also launched and coordinated a dizzying array of initiatives in literature and the arts in both the United States and Europe.

was born Mojsze Agatstein in 1903 in Korolowka, Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine), and died in 1983 in Warsaw, Poland. A lyric poet and essayist of Jewish origin, he survived the terrible years of the Nazi occupation in Poland, and published a dozen volumes of poetry during his lifetime, including A Human Matter, A Meeting in Time, Protected Hour, and Memorials. He concerned himself most often with subjects of philosophy and morality and shunned Jewish themes in his poetry (with the exception of a few poems). However, as a poet who published his poems in resistance periodicals, he couldn't turn his back on the horrors of the genocide, nor was he able to escape historical necessity and despair in even his most mystical writings. Jastrun is considered to be one of the most important Polish poets of the years between the two world wars. He translated French, Russian, and German poets (including Rilke) into Polish. His work is included in Postwar Polish Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Czesław Miłosz.

was born in 1963 in the Romanian city of Gălăţi. He published his first book of poems in 1987, News About Me, his second six year later, Keeping Tight Fists, and since then, the equivalent of a book of poetry or prose each year. Among recent poetry titles are My Grave Digs Itself, 2003, and the book from which the poems here derive, The Starry Womb, 2005. Amniotic Poems, 2008, won the poetry prize of the Writers Association of Bucharest. Gălăţanu is editor-in-chief of the periodical, The Financial Marketplace.

(1908–1988) was a Hungarian writer whose works include novels, short stories, essays, translations (most notably, Gulliver's Travels and Ulysses), and a diary spanning the years 1930 to 1988. Published in 1934, his debut novel, Prae, depicts the totality of the world of the 1920s and is an encyclopedic narrative in the vein of Dante's Divine Comedy and Balzac's Human Comedy, though its narrative innovations situate it more among the masterpieces of literary modernism. In 1939, he began his epic synthesis of two thousand years of European culture, the St. Orpheus Breviary, penned a series of biographical novels on artists and musicians, then continued the Orpheus cycle in 1972. The last book that appeared in his lifetime was Frivolities & Confessions. His archive is held at The Petőfi Literary Museum of Budapest. In 1988, he was awarded the Kossuth Prize. Szentkuthy is recognized as one of the most prodigious and innovative writers of the twentieth century.

is a writer and columnist. After graduating from the University of Sarajevo he started a literary career while working as a journalist. His first published books were collections of poetry, but it was his prose that made him famous in the subsequent years. Sarajevo Malboro, his first book of short stories published in English, was critically praised. He has published close to thirty books and has been widely translated. He lives in Zagreb, Croatia.

was born in 1956 in Bucharest, Romania. One of the foremost contemporary novelists and poets of Romania's Blue Jeans Generation of the 1970s, his work was always strongly influenced by American writing in opposition to the official Communist ideology. Cărtărescu is the winner of the Romanian Writers' Union Prize and the Romanian Academy's Prize, among other awards, and in 1992 he was nominated for the Prix Mèdicis. His novel Nostalgia was published by New Directions. He currently lives in Bucharest.

(Slobozia, 1950) is a Romanian poet, journalist and editor. He has also been a strong critic of Communism and of Romanian political figures associated with Communism. In 1988, his book Moartea citeşte ziarul ("Death is reading the newspaper") was turned down by the Communist regime's censorship apparatus; it was later published in Amsterdam. In 1989, he was fired from the journal România Literară and held under house arrest after an interview of his appeared in the French newspaper Libération, in which he criticized President Nicolae Ceauşescu. Today, Dinescu is involved in a number of significant media outfits; he also hosts a political talk show on Realitatea TV. Both Dinescu's poems and his on-air persona bear the mark of his sarcastic, inventive, and often shocking style. The prominent philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu has dubbed Dinescu "the symbol and flag bearer of the Romanian suburbs," a compliment to his authenticity and his reputation as a cultural hero.

(1931–2011) is a major Romanian voice of the second half of the twentieth century. He published his first book, lines (1968), at the age of thirty-seven, and continued to produce volumes featuring his plain, lower-case titles—among them, poems (1970), poetry (1970), other lines (1972), other poems (1973), new poetry (1982), and poems old, new (1989). An indefatigable translator of English, German and French literature into Romanian, he was responsible for works by Kafka, Arendt, Leonard Bernstein, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Musil, and a 1986 anthology of contemporary American poetry. His prizes in Romania span two decades. The translations in Asymptote were included in lines poems poetry by Mircea Ivănescu, translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Lidia Vianu, and published in the UK by the University of Plymouth Press, 2009; the book was shortlisted for the Poetry Society (U.K.) biennial Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation.

is originally from El Hamel in Algeria. A poet, playwright, novelist, translator and journalist, he is also the president of Écritures Vagabondes — an organization which puts together international writing residencies. One of the most prolific contemporary writers of the French language, he is a recipient of the Prix Lugano du théâtre, the 2005 Prix SACD de la francophonie and a Jury Special Mention from the Grand Prix de littérature dramatique 2007. His work often explores contemporary Muslim identity and the role of religion in society. Kacimi has collaborated with poets Bernard Noël and Eugène Guillevic and his articles have appeared in Actuel, Le Monde and France Culture. He has written multiple books including an encyclopedia of the Arab world for children. He is based in Paris.

is a Moroccan poet, among the most important voices in Arab literature. He was born in 1948 in Fez, Morocco. He is also the translator into Arabic of Stéphane Mallarmé, Georges Bataille, and Bernard Noël. In 1974, he founded the magazine Al Thaqâfa Al Jadida ("The New Culture"), which played an active role in the cultural life of Morocco until it was closed down in 1984. In 1985, together with university professors and writers, he established the publishing house Dar Toubkal. He was the driving force behind the funding of The House of Poetry in Morocco in 1996 and was its president from 1996 to 2003. He has published fourteen poetry collections and more than 30 titles of poetry, prose, essays, and translations. He has received several awards in Europe and the Middle East. His poetry has been translated into numerous languages, including French, German, Spanish, English, Swedish, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese.

is considered to be among the "fathers" of the Swahili novel. Born in 1918, he was raised in the cosmopolitan capital of Zanzibar, at that time under British rule. He attended both Koranic and British schools, later working as a journalist and editor. At the same time, his fiction—featuring inimitably Zanzibari characters and a detective so similiar to the author that people referred to Abdulla by his fictional hero's name, and written in a simultaneously highly literary and deeply local, maritime Swahili—brought him increasing popularity. Before his death in 1991, he published eight 'Bwana Msa' novels, all of which pose questions still relevant in East Africa today: What happens when people we thought we knew become strangers to us? How do the poor and the wealthy coexist? And what makes violence possible? For Abdulla's hero Bwana Msa, the only answer to these impossible questions is a relentless 'observation of human goings-on' which aims in the end to kindly but firmly find justice, even for the dead.

is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, novels, short story collections, and scholarly articles. Albania's former Minister of Culture, Zeqo currently lives in Tirana, where for a number of years he served as director of the National History Museum, and where he now works as a freelance writer and journalist. His volume of poetry I Don't Believe in Ghosts was translated by Wayne Miller and published in the United States in 2007 (BOA Editions).

is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart (Mud Luscious, 2009) and the editor of Tell: An Anthology of Expository Narrative (Flatmancrooked, 2011). Her website can be found here.

was born in 1990 in Vienna, Austria. She graduated from the American University of Paris in 2012 with a B.A. in comparative literature and fine arts. Her senior thesis examined childhood and imagination in the work of David Grossman. While at AUP, she spent two years as an intern performing research for the acclaimed collection The Letters of Samuel Beckett. As a graduate, she continues to pursue her interests in both literature and art; she regularly contributes literary reviews to The Quarterly Conversation and is also working on several projects as an illustrator.

studied Chinese language and literature at the universities of Erlangen, Bochum, and Beijing. Her Ph.D. thesis dealt with literature on the Cultural Revolution. Since 2009, she has been Visiting Professor at the Institute of Chinese Studies at Erlangen University. Her current fields of interest are contemporary Chinese literature, relations between China and the West, and cultural trends in China.

Monica Rinck is the author of to refrain from embracing reviewed in the Oct 2012 issue.

is a lawyer-turned-translator. She grew up in Bangkok and Boston, and practiced law in New York City before returning to the literary field. She is currently wrapping up an M.A. in cultural translation at the American University of Paris and previously studied literature as an undergraduate at Harvard College. She is in the midst of translating Prabda Yoon's short-story collection Kwan Na Ja Pen (Pen in Parentheses) and is working to promote Thai literature through translation and writing.

(b. 1955, Istanbul) is a Turkish author, short story writer, playwright and poet. He received his Bachelor's degree from the Drama Department at Ankara University. His first collection of poems, Osmanlıya Dair Hikayat (Stories about Ottomans), published in 1980, made Mungan an overnight success. Other poetry books followed, notably Yaz Geçer (Summer Passes) and Metal. He has written four plays, of which Mahmud ile Yezida and Taziye are two of the most staged plays of modern Turkish theatre. His short stories have been compiled in volumes such as Kırk Oda (Forty Rooms) and Paranın Cinleri (Genies of Money). Openly gay, Mungan is often considered an icon of the Turkish gay movement.

was born in 1932 in Miryang in South Gyeongsang Province of Korea. He has lived in the mountains since he became a novice monk at the age of seven. Over the years he has written over a hundred poems, including many in sijo form. In 2007 he received the Cheong Chi-yong Literary Award for his book Distant Holy Man. The lineage holder of the Mt. Gaji school of Korean Nine Mountains Zen, he is in retreat as the head of Baekdamsa Temple at Mt. Seoraksan.

(August 4, 1923-) was born in Tonk, Rajasthan during British colonial rule in South Asia. He has published four books: ENGLISH TRANSLATION (Chiragh talay, 1961); Dust in my Mouth (Khakam-ba-dahan, 1969); My Long Flirtation with Banking (Zarguzasht, 1976) and Mirages of the Mind (Aab-i-gum, 1990), with his first two books both winning the Adamjee Prize for Literature and Mirages of the Mind winning the Hijra Award, as well as the Pakistan Academy of Letters Award for best book. For his writing, he has received the Hilal-i-Imtiaz and the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, two of the most coveted awards for the arts in Pakistan. He stands today as one of the most venerated living authors in Urdu literature.

(b.1948) is a Syrian author who was imprisoned for more than twelve years by the Syrian regime for his political activities as a member of the leftist opposition to the regime of Hafez al-Assad. From 1982-1994, Khalifa was held without trial at various state security prisons, including the infamous Tadmur Military Prison, a detention center described as a "kingdom of death and madness" by poet Faraj Bayraqdar and the "absolute prison" by dissident Yassin al-Haj Salih. He is the author of The Shell, which has been lauded as one of the finest examples of Arabic prison literature, and which has been translated into French as La Coquille. He currently lives in exile, where he continues to write against the al-Assad regime.

attended the Golden Needle Sewing School as a teenager in Herat, Afghanistan, in which a group of women gathered to meet and discuss literature with local professors under the guise of practicing needlepoint (a pastime approved by the Taliban government). In 2001, with Afghanistan's liberation from the Taliban, Anjuman began attending Herat University and soon published a book of poetry titled Gul-e-dodi (Dark Flower). Her readership was not limited to Afghanistan—Gul-e-dodi found readers in Iran, Pakistan, and beyond. She continued to write poetry despite the objections of her husband and his family, and she was set to publish a second volume of poetry in 2006 titled Yek Sàbad Délhoreh (An Abundance of Worry). In November 2005, Anjuman's husband beat her and Anjuman ultimately died from the altercation. In 2007, Anjuman's complete works were published in the original Dari by the Iranian Burnt Books Foundation. Gul-e-dodi has been reprinted three times, selling over three thousand copies.

was born in Hargeisa, Somalia and joined her sailor father in London in 1986. Her début novel Black Mamba Boy was published by HarperCollins in 2010 and is a fictionalised account of her father's adventures in Africa during the 1930s. The novel won the Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors and was nominated for the Orange Prize, Guardian First Book Prize, John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize and PEN Open Book Award.

is a translator of early Soviet and contemporary Armenian literature. Her translations have appeared in Taderon Press, Ararat Magazine, Groong, IANYAN Magazine, and the Writers' Hub. She also taught Literary Translation at Yerevan State Linguistic University in Armenia for five semesters before embracing a full-time position as a literary translator for the First Armenian Literary Agency. Her current projects include the translation of Aksel Bakunts's oeuvre and Aram Pachyan's novel Goodbye, Bird.

is a Danish poet and author, originally from Greenland, with nearly twenty works in various genres to her name. She has received numerous honors, including the Nordic nations' most prestigious literary prize—the Nordic Council's Literature Prize—in 2008 for Baboon. Her work has been translated into several languages. Her work has also been anthologized in the Best European Fiction series and has appeared in leading American journals of translation. Baboon was published in the US by Two Lines Press in 2014.

("White Orchid") was a sequestered noblewoman who lived during the sixteenth century in Korea. Considered by many Korean scholars to be Korea's greatest female poet, she died at the age of twenty-seven.

was born in 1992 and was diagnosed with autism at the age of five. He graduated from high school in 2011 and lives in Kimitsu, Japan. He is an advocate, motivational speaker and the author of several books of fiction and non-fiction.

(born in Juchitán, Mexico) was the first woman to write and publish in the indigenous language of Zapotec. She has published four volumes of poetry in bilingual form (Isthmus Zapotec and Spanish). Her poetry has been translated into English, French, German, Vietnamese, and Italian. In 2004 she received the Premio Nacional de Literatura Nezahualcoyotl for her book of poetry, Guie' yaase'/Olivo negro.

is Asymptote's Kenya editor-at-large. She has contributed articles on twentieth-century poetry to the Poetry Society's youth magazine and the Oxford University Poetry Society's magazine, Ash, as well as served as an editor for Bluestocking, the Oxford-based feminist journal. Her undergraduate dissertation, "This Land of Twoness and Oneness: Twins in the Postcolonial Novel," examined representations of twinship in the contemporary Nigerian novel. A graduate of the University of Oxford, she was recently awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue further studies in literature.

was reviewed in the Jul 2012 issue.

is at the forefront of a generation of contemporary writers whose works interrogate French capitalist, colonialist, and nationalist narratives. Jeanne Darc, from which these excerpts are drawn, can be understood as a gendered, critical analysis of the historical myth, an investigation of an iconic figure of French nationalism. Quintane is one of the major experimental poets of her generation now publishing prolifically in France. With Stéphane Bérard and Christophe Tarkos, she founded the journal RR in the 1990s, essentially a parody of a literary review. She publishes widely in poetry journals like Nioques and Java, and often gives lectures and performances in France and abroad.

is the author of a score of books written in English or French, including Sisyphus, Outdone., Carnet de somme, We Press Ourselves Plainly, and L'injure. Je Nathanaël exists in self-translation, as does the essay of correspondence, Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book), first published in French as L'absence au lieu. Some texts exist in Basque, Slovene, and Spanish (Mexico), with book-length translations in Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazil). Nathanaël's translations include works by Édouard Glissant, Danielle Collobert, Catherine Mavrikakis and Hilda Hilst, the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo. Her translation of The Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert will be published by Nightboat Books in 2014. Nathanaël lives in Chicago.

was born in Bạc Liêu in 1958 and lives in Ho Chi Minh City. He is the author of four collections of poems in Vietnamese, Đêm mặt trời mọc [Night of the Rising Sun] (1990), Khí hậu đồ vật [Inanimate Weather] (1997), e-book Của căn cước ẩn dụ [Coded Personal Info] (2001) and samizdat Ê, tao đây [Hey, I'm Here] (2005). His work appears regularly in the leading Vietnamese literary journals, including Berlin-based talawas and Sydney-based Tiền Vệ. Translated in English, his work appears in The Literary Review, New American Writing, Almost Island, and Filling Station. Featured in Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), his work also appears in the forthcoming anthology, The Deluge: New Vietnamese Poetry (Chax Press), both edited and translated by Linh Dinh.

(born 1962 in Osica de Sus, Romania) has published eight collections of poetry in Romanian: On the Edge (1995); Fincler (1997); The Dead-End Road Named Homer (2002); Folfa (2003); Wind, Tobacco & Alcohol (2008); The Woman that I Write About (2010); VorbaIago (2012); and Persona (2013). He has also published four collections of essays, the most recent of which is Romanian Intellectuals and the King's Court (2011). He has received several awards for his poetry from the Writers' Union of Romania. His work has been included in the anthologies Gefährliche Serpentinen – Rumänische Lyrik der Gegenwart (Druckhaus Verlag, Berlin, 1998), edited by Dieter Schlesak; Of Gentle Wolves (Calypso Editions, New York, 2011), translated and edited by Martin Woodside; and The Vanishing Point that Whistles (Talisman Press, USA, 2011), edited by Paul-Doru Mugur, Adam Sorkin, and Claudia Serea.

is the author of fifteen volumes of poetry and creative non-fiction; his last several books of poetry focus on a single mountain, Juliau, in the Ardèche region of south-central France. These are the opening pages of La face nord de Juliau, six. Two volumes of the series have been published in English translation: Physis (Free Verse Editions 2006) and Juliology (Counterpath Press, 2009). Pesquès has also written extensively on visual artists, including Gilles Aillaud, Aurelie Nemours, Jan Voss, Anne Deguelle, and Paul Wallach. He divides his time between the Ardèche and Paris.

grew up in The Netherlands, West Africa and England. After getting a degree in social anthropology he worked as researcher, journalist and literary critic, before finding an abiding love: translation. He usually works in partnership with Harm Damsma, with whom he translated work by Nadeem Aslam, Jonathan Coe, Joseph O' Connor, Douglas Coupland, Michel Faber, David Mitchell, Rick Moody, Richard Powers, George Saunders, Walter Scott, Adam Thorpe and Tod Wodicka. Among their recent co-productions are the modern classics Lord of the Flies by William Golding and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

is a full time poet and short story writer with awards from The Danish Arts Council. In English he has We Are Here, published by Book Thug, and poetry and fiction in numerous magazines including The Literary Review, Ecotone, Exile, The Los Angeles Review and PRISM International. In his native Danish he is the author of six collections of poetry and three books of short fiction. His work has been translated into several languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Spanish and Chinese. He has travelled widely in Europe, Asia, North and South America. He lives in Copenhagen.

is the founding co-artistic director of the Belarus Free Theatre and one of the main initiators of Global Artistic Campaign Free Belarus. He is the author of Generation Jeans and Discover Love among 10 other plays and 200 over publications. Generation Jeans has been performed at the most prestigious stages of the world such as the Swedish Royal Theatre, the Norwegian National Theatre, and New York's Public Theatre, and, in August of 2008, in a house of President Vaclav Havel on his invitation. In May 2006 his play Here I am, together with five other works, was selected from 557 plays at Berlin Theatrical Festival. Khalezin also is the co-author of Eurepica, a play that aimed to create a new European Epic. In addition, a performance of Discover Love was recognized as an Outstanding Off-Off-Broadway performance by Independent Theatre Bloggers Association in New-York.

was born in Mexico City in 1977. His professional activities have developed mainly as a playwright, theater critic, teacher, translator and literary essayist. He was the theatre reviewer of the Mexican cultural supplement La Jornada Semanal from newspaper La Jornada for almost a decade, and has been a regular contributor for other newspapers and magazines. He has received artistic development grants from the Mexican Foundation for Young Writers, the National Fund for Culture and Arts, the Laboratorio Fronterizo de Escritores/Writing Lab on the Border, the Royal Court Theatre of London. He took part in the 2009 edition of The Word Exchange, a fifteen-day residency at the Lark Play Development Center in New Yok City in November 2009. He has received two awards for his work. The first of them was the 2007 National Theatrical Essay Award, convoked by the National Institute for Fine Arts and PasodeGato magazine. The second was the 2010 Chilango – fmx Scenic Arts Award, promoted by Editorial Expansión and the Festival del Centro Histórico of Mexico City. He has had four of his plays produced throughout México, and has developed collaborative scenic works as dramatist, stage manager, producer, director and assistant director with some of the most outstanding Mexican theatre companies, like Teatro Línea de Sombra, ASYC Teatro de Movimiento, Realizando Ideas, El Rinoceronte Enamorado, and Cardumen Teatro.

(Chile, 1971) is an actress and writer. She has published the short story collection El Cielo (2000), and the novels Mapocho (2002), Av. 10 de Julio Huamachuco (2007)—both of them winners of the Santiago Municipal Prize for Literature and both translated into German—as well as Fuenzalida (2012), and Space Invaders (2013). Her stories have been translated and published in various national and international anthologies, garnering distinctions including first prize in the Gabriela Mistral Literary Games. In 2011, she was named by the Guadalajara book fair as one of the 25 best-kept secrets of Latin American literature. El Taller (The Workshop), her first play, opened in 2012 with her theater company, La Fusa, and won the Chilean Altazor prize for best script.

(Buenos Aires, 1905-1972), a contemporary of Jose Luis Borges, Victoria Ocampo, Pablo Neruda, and Federico García Lorca, published three books of poetry and eight books of prose. An integral player in the ultraist literary movement, for many years she hosted avant-guard literary gatherings on Saturday nights at her family home on Tronador Street. She married the poet Oliverio Girondo. Borges wrote the prologue to her first book of verse, La calle de la tarde (1925), and her childhood memoirs, Cuadernos de infancia (1937), has been translated into French, German, Norwegian, and Portuguese.

(b. 1960, Sau Paulo) is best known as a visual artist. With his sculptures and multimedia pieces and installations, he has represented Brazil at the Vienna Biennale. Critics consider him among the best living Brazilian artists. In recent years, he has become more recognized as a writer, with the publication of Cujo (1993), O pão de corvo (2001), and Ó (2008). This last work, a collection of short fiction, received Brazil's most prestigious literary prize, the Prêmio Portugal Telecom de Literatura, in 2009. His writing crosses genres of narrative, poetry, and essay, exploring the materialism of language.

(b. 1976) has published seven books, including The Elephant in My Bed (2007), which received the Grand Ion Vinea Award as well as the debut award of the Bucharest Writers' Association, and Psychoroulette (2008), which won the George Coşbuc Special Poetry Prize at the National Poetry Festival. Her most recent book, Pathfinder (2012), received the Ion Minulescu National Prize. She was awarded first place for foreign poetry in the International Contest of Poetry and Prose held by the Napoli Cultural Classic Association in 2013. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English, French, Hungarian, and most recently, Dutch. She is a member of the Romanian Writers' Union and the Romanian PEN Center.

(b. 1964) grew up in Havana, Cuba.  He earned a degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Havana. Pérez is the author of the collections  Algo de lo Sagrado, Oíste hablar del gato de pelea?, Canciones y letanías, Lingua Franca, and Crítica de la Razón Puta, for which he won the Nicolás Guillén Prize for Poetry.  A book of essays, La perseverancia de un hombre oscuro, earned him Cuba's National Critics' Prize for that genre in 2000.  He is also a literary translator with numerous publications.  Currently Pérez serves a percussionist for dance-theater performances.

(1891–1938) was one of the most well-known poets of the Russian Silver Age, and a central figure of the "Acmeist" school of poetry. He was born in Warsaw, spent part of his childhood in St. Petersburg, and studied in Paris and Heidelberg before returning to Russia. Mandlestam also wrote essays, literary criticism, and memoirs, and worked as a translator and newspaper correspondent for a living. In response to the criticisms of Stalin and his regime in some of his poetry, the Soviet government sent the poet first into internal exile, then to a camp in Siberia, where he died.

was born in 1891 and grew up in St. Petersburg. Part of the concentration of outstanding artists and poets in Petersburg in the pre-First World War period, he was a member of the Acmeist group along with Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev. From the mid-1920s onwards, Mandelstam faced increasing difficulties in publishing his work and fell near-silent. In 1930, Politburo member Nikolai Bukharin arranged for him to travel to the Caucasus, resulting in more poetry and prose, but with Stalin's consolidation of power, Mandelstam was exiled to the city of Voronezh, and eventually deported to a labour camp in the Soviet Far East, where he died in 1938. He published two books of poetry, Stone and Tristia, in his lifetime, while other work has appeared posthumously as The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1930-1937.

played a central role in the 1980s underground Sichuanese poetry scene that gave rise to the Chinese poetic avant-garde, and during that time he became known as one of the "Five Masters from Sichuan." Since then he has emerged as one of China's most prominent literary figures, authoring four books of poetry and essays and publishing numerous works of criticism on art, music, and literature. He is also a noted calligrapher. In 2010 he was awarded the Chinese Literature Media Award for poetry. He lives in Beijing and travels frequently to the U.S. and Germany.

studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires, received his PhD from Princeton University in Comparative Literature, and currently teaches Latin-American literature at Tufts University. He focuses on twentieth-century Latin-American fiction, poetry, poetics, Oulipo, and the art of translation. His essays, translations, and travel pieces (as well as some palindromes) have been published in journals from France, Brazil, the US, and Mexico. 

was born in Brittany in 1944. His first book, Le poème du pays qui a faim (1967) became a manifesto of Breton militancy. While remaining intensely interested in Celtic mythology, he taught for almost thirty years at Brown and Duke before returning to France in 2009. He is both playwright and poet. His most recent book is a Collected Poems: Les trucs sont démolis (2008). Burning Deck has published a translation of his Boudica.

is a Uyghur writer and journalist born in 1965 in Tacheng, Xinjiang. She has received multiple prizes, including the inaugural Xinjiang Development and Construction Literature Award, and her essay "We Slept the Winter on the Hay" was included in a best-of collection for 2012. Her essay collection Secrets Shared with Sheep was published in 2012.

is an author.

is an author.

was born in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil. A former activist, he moved on to teach law at university in Porto Alegre for ten years and has had four books of fiction and four of poetry published. He translates from English, writes screenplays, hosts literary workshops, and writes for a number of magazines and newspapers. His first novel, Ainda orangotangos (Still Orang-utans, 2003), was adapted for film by director Gustavo Spolidoro and won the 13th Milano Film Festival, and his play Crucial dois um (Decisive two one) received the FUNARTE/Myriam Muniz de Teatro 2006 award. Nowhere People was awarded the Machado de Assis Prize 2012 and the Fundação Biblioteca Nacional 2012 Prize, and it was nominated for many more awards, including the prestigious Prêmio Portugal Telecom de Literatura 2012. Nowhere People is Scott's first novel to be published in English. He lives in Rio de Janeiro.

(b. 1950) is an internationally recognized writer whose works have been translated into twenty-five languages at last count. Voted Man of the Year (1999) and recipient of the Kossuth Prize (1997), the Peace Prize of the German Book Publishers (2004), and the Manes Sperber Literary Prize (2009), among others, he is easily one of the most popular writers in Europe today. A novelist, essayist, and playwright, he has published 34 books and plays to date. He is best known in England and the U.S. for The Book of Hrabal (1994), She Loves Me (1997), and his magnum opus, Celestial Harmonies (2004). Called "one of the most interesting and original writers of our time" by Mario Vargas Llosa, he is notorious for his clever use of language, as a result of which he likes to think of himself as untranslatable, as well as his intricate multiplicity of themes and meanings, which he presents with such seeming ease, that they can easily go unnoticed by the unaware reader. He is also known for taking intertextuality to new heights and for using quotes to "shatter" the complacency of his text. Coming from a family of renowned aristocrats, his connection to German culture is evident in most of his works. His latest novel, Esti, was published in Budapest in 2010.

(b. 1942, Budapest) is a renowned Hungarian essayist, short story writer, and novelist, whose Book of Memories Susan Sontag called "the greatest novel written in our time, and one of the greatest books of the century." He also wrote a trilogy of plays, Spring Cleaning (Takarítás, 1977), Encounter (Találkozás, 1979) and Interment (Temetés, 1980) which, with their revolutionary style and incisive look at life, swept over the stages of Hungary, only to be eclipsed by the success of his monumental novels. All three one-act plays posit a new kind of theater that in Nádas's own words is not literary but physical—an opera of words, a ballet of movements, minimalist, bare, heavy with pregnant silences imprisoned by space and time. They also evidence Nádas's masterful use of minute movements on stage, which he considers the basic forms of human contact. "The human face and body," he wrote in Játéktér (1988), "the play of expression and the system of gestures reveal, in a very real way, the individual's experiences, and through it, the environment in which he came by these experiences." In Encounter, his best-known play, this environment is as much political as it is social and personal.

Péter Nádas is the recipient of the Kossuth Prize as well as numerous prestigious international prizes, including the Soros Foundation Artist's Prize and Brücke Berlin Prize, among others. He lives and works in the small Hungarian village of Gombosszeg.

is considered one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Romanian playwriting. He has won many awards, including the London Fringe Report Award for Best Play/Relationship Drama (2006) for The Sunshine Play, the Heidelberg Stuckemarkt Innovation Award (2007) for Romania 21, the Irish Embassy Award for Best Romanian Play, 2010 for 5 Miraculous Minutes in Piatra Neamt, and Best Play at the Romanian Playwriting Festival in Timisoara (2011) for Rosia Montana. He was also one of five European playwrights selected at the Berliner Theatertreffen Stückemarkt 2010, with Wire and Acrobats. In 2012, the production of his play Targoviste de Jucarie (Playground Targoviste) was selected at the New Plays from Europe festival in Wiesbaden. He was also one of the top thirty-five European playwrights featured in the thirty-fifth Anniversary Edition of the Berliner Theatertreffen in May 2013.

(1912–1994), born in Barcelona, was trained as a graphic artist and set designer. During the 1930s he contributed articles and cartoons to the Catalan press and began writing fiction, publishing a novel and story collections. He belonged to the Catalan Socialist Party and joined the Republican army during the Civil War. In 1939, when Franco's dictatorship was established, Calders went into exile in Mexico, where he stayed until 1962. Although he continued to produce a steady stream of fiction, even winning awards, it was not until the late 1970s that he came to be recognized as a major twentieth-century writer. He published five novels and nearly a thousand pages of short fiction. Very little of this work appears in English.

is the author of numerous books of poetry, criticism, and fiction, both in Spanish and in Catalán. His writing is notable for its visual power, the range of its references, and its extraordinary lexical refinement, as well as a profound concern with the role of the artist in his engagement with his forebears and the historical responsibility of the intellectual.

lives and writes in Chicago, Illinois. His creative work has most recently appeared at Action, Yes; elimae; and Strange Machine. He just co-wrote a pedagogical essay, "Rats in Labyrinths: Constraint and Freedom in the Creative Writing Classroom," about employing Oulipian techniques in the teaching of writing. He teaches Composition and Literature at Loyola, Northeastern Illinois, and Roosevelt Universities.

was born in 1976 in Stuttgart. He studied English literature and art history in Vancouver and Brighton. In 2010 he completed his dissertation, Negative Poetics, at the University of Konstanz. He received the 2013 Clemens Brentano Prize for Life Opens Upward, the collection in which this story appears. His first novel The Ship that Sails, Singing, on Its Course was published in 2013.

was born in 1950 in the Paris suburb Auvers-sur-Oise. A retired schoolteacher, Delerm writes fiction, essays, and children's books. He lives with his wife, Martine, a photographer and illustrator, in Normandy. His first book was published in 1983, and his oeuvre includes over forty titles. He has won several prizes, including the Prix Grandgousier for La Première gorgée de bière et autres plaisirs minuscules, 1997; this essay collection was also a number-one bestseller in France and has been translated into English as We Could Almost Eat Outside: An Appreciation of Life's Small Pleasures.

was born in 1967 in Gemona del Friuli. He has published seven collections of poetry. Among his awards are the Montale Europa prize (2004), the Bagutta Opera Prima prize (2007), and the prestigious Viareggio-Rèpaci prize (2010) for his collection Mandate a dire all'imperatore (Crocetti Editore). In 2013, Rizzoli published his selected poems in the volume Azzurro elementare, together with his first narrative work, Questa Libertà, which won him the 2014 Terzani prize.

(1948-2009) was born in Paris. Over the course of his career he published dozens of works; his poetry, however, never gained widespread recognition. With little taste for the politics of poetry, his often short, lyrical poems populated by myriad animals, women, colors, and death, acquired instead a small but cult following. He was a regular contributor to Les Cahiers de l'Umbo and Le Bathyscaphe and was involved in many surrealist ventures, such as the Éditions Maintenant, Éditions Toril, and the literary journal Le Cerceau. In 1990 he founded the Éditions Myrddin, which he directed until 2008. His fascination with surrealism resulted from a fortuitous meeting with André Breton in his teenage years. Though his poetry came to transcend the boundaries of a surrealist work—by being both more lyrical and inhabited by more substantial narratives—Peuchmaurd never forgot the movement and the artists that first inspired him. He died in Brive.

(b. 1973) is one of the foremost names in contemporary Hindi literature and art. He founded the Hindi journals, Purovak and Bahuvachan; has edited two anthologies of folk studies, Lok and Lok ka Aalok, as well as two volumes of Kala Bharati for the Lalit Kala Akademi; and has for many years edited Udaipur's quarterly journal, Rangaayan. Daiya has translated Haku Shah's essays and children's fiction as well as the Greek poet Cavafy into Hindi, and is currently working on an anthology of world poetry. Three book-length conversations with the painters Haku Shah, Akhilesh and Manish Pushkale have also been published, while two similar projects with Ramkumar and Prahbhakar Kolte are in the works. Daiya is currently working on finishing his novel, Marg Madarjaat, for which he was awarded the Krishna Baldev Vaid Fellowship; a second collection of his poetry is also soon to be published.

is a writer, translator and graphic designer. He is the author of multiple short-story collections, novels and screenplays and has translated The Catcher in the Rye and A Clockwork Orange into Thai. Bangkok-born and Bangkok-based, he went to high school in the Boston area and attended the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. His short-story collection Kwam Na Ja Pen (translated here as Pen in Parentheses) won the S.E.A. Write Award in 2002. A prominent figure in contemporary Thai writing, he also owns a bookstore called Bookmoby and runs the Bangkok Creative Writing Workshop, now in its third year, at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center. His current projects include the translation of Lolita and other writing endeavors.

was born in Birmingham, Alabama and currently works there as an attorney.

lived in the decades just before the birth of Christ, a Roman at the dawn of the Roman Empire. Practically no historical facts about his life come down to us, neither the year of his birth or death, nor his full name, nor the real name of the beloved whom he praised, cursed, and mourned as Cynthia. Perhaps ninety or so of his Latin poems survive—even where these poems begin and end is uncertain.

was born in Mexico City in 1952, but spent part of her childhood in Mérida, Yucatan, and attended high school in the USA. She is the author of several important books including, most recently, Santo y seña which won Mexico's most prestigious poetry award, the Villaurrutia Prize. Her selected poems in English, No Shelter, was published in Forrest Gander's translation by Graywolf Press in 2002. Gander's new translation of Santo y seña, Watchword, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in Spring 2011.

is a twentieth-century Chinese essayist and fiction writer. His Humans, Beasts and Ghosts, translated by Christopher G. Rea, is reviewed by Dylan Suher in the July 2012 issue.

is an author.

is a published playwright and essayist. He is currently an associate professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

was born in Barcelona in 1952. He has been awarded the National Award, the City of Barcelona Award, the Prudenci Bertrana Award, the El Temps Award, the Lletra d'Or Prize for the best book of the year, and the Catalan Writers' Award; he has been awarded Serra d'Or magazine's prestigious Critics' Award four times. He has also translated numerous authors into Catalan, including Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway.

was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1950. He started out studying engineering before turning to poetry. His early work is a ferocious response to Augusto Pinochet's 1973 military coup. Like many other Chileans, Zurita was arrested and tortured. When he was released, he helped to form the radical artistic group CADA and became renowned for his provocative and intensely physical public performances. He has written what are perhaps the most massively scaled poems ever created. He has done this with earth-moving equipment and with smoke-trailing aircraft. In the early 1980s Zurita famously sky-wrote passages from his poem, "The New Life," over New York and later—still during the reign of Pinochet—he bulldozed the phrase "Ni Pena Ni Miedo" ("Without Pain Or Fear") into the Atacama Desert which, for its length—two miles—, can only be seen from the sky. Zurita is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Poetry Prize of Chile. His books of poems include, among others: Purgatorio (1979), Anteparadise (1982), El paraíso está vacío (1984), Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), El amor de Chile (1987), La vida nueva (1993), INRI (2003), Las ciudades de agua (2007), In Memoriam (2007), Los países muertos (2006), Sueños para Kurosawa (2010), and Zurita (2011). His poetry has been translated into several languages, among others, English, Italian, German, Chinese, Hindi, and partially in reviews, into French, Greek, Portuguese, Swedish, Russian, Turkish, and ten other languages. He lives in Santiago, Chile, where he is a professor of literature at Universidad Diego Portales.

has taught philosophy at Tel Aviv University and is an accomplished editor, working for several academic publishers. She has published both fiction and works of scholarship, among which are Lectures on Philosophy and Religion, and Nietzsche: Thoughts on Western Civilization (1990). Her two published novels are The Vast Kingdom (2005) and The Tel Avivians (2006), and her short stories have appeared regularly in various literary magazines, including Granta. Stalin Is Dead is her second work of fiction to be translated into English, and it will be followed by Days of Peace (Seagull Books).

was born and lives in Tangiers, Morocco. Her education was bilingual in French and Arabic. Her advanced studies were in French literature. Her first collection of poetry, Femme je suis, was published in France in 1981 by "les inéditions Barbare." Her second collection, Contes d'un tête tranchée, was published in Morocco in 2001 by Les Editions Al-Forkane. A book comprising both of these, entitled Blessures au vent, was published in Paris by Les Editions de la Différence in 2006, along with Rachida's first novel, L'Histoire peut attendre. She is presently working on a new book of poems and a second novel, having in the interim made her début as a painter. Sections from Contes d'une tête tranchée, in Marilyn Hacker's translation, have appeared in various journals in the United States and Great Britain, including WordsWithoutBorders, Banipal, Magma and Callalloo. The book will be published in Yale University Press' Margellos Translation Series in 2012.

is a poet, critic, and profesor of litreature at the Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu, Romania.  He has published four volumes of poetry to great acclaim and seen his poetry translated into several language. He also serves as an Editor for „Translyvania" and „Poesis International."  His latest book is Sebastian in Dreams.

was born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in New York. He is a co-founder of the Nietzsche Circle and served as its director for numerous years. During that time, he established the journal Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, which he co-edited with Mark Daniel Cohen from 2006 to 2011. Thereafter, he formed Contra Mundum, an independent press based in New York and Berlin. To date, CMP has published translations from Sumerian, French, Hungarian, Italian, and German. Hanshe is the author of The Acolytes, The Abdication, and most recently the editor of Richard Foreman's Plays with Films. For some time, he worked as an assistant to Nan Goldin. His writings have appeared in Literatura, Jelenkor, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Chris Marker, and elsewhere. His essays on incubation and synaesthesia in Nietzsche are forthcoming. He is working on two new novels, Now, Wonder and Virtualize!

is a Chilean playwright/director with an undergraduate degree in sociology from the University of Essex, England, and an M.A. in theatre studies from the University of Louvain, Belgium. He is the founder of Teatro Fin de Siglo and of "El Trolley," a space for cultural resistance to the Chilean military dictatorship. Griffero's plays and productions have been essential components in the resurgence of contemporary Chilean theatre. His works have been produced and premiered in Latin America and Europe and have been translated and published in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Czech. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Thot Prize (1999), and he has also published a number of essays on art and politics. Currently he teaches at the Universidad Católica (Santiago, Chile) and directs the theatre school at the Universidad ARCIS (Santiago, Chile). His website can be found here.

(1952-2004), was a charismatic cult musician, actor, radio personality, and writer. Born in Hyogo, Japan, he graduated from the Osaka University of Art and then worked as a salesman in a printing company for five years, during which time he increasingly turned to music and writing, as well as alcohol and 'legal' drugs. He became a professional writer in 1987, and authored work for TV, theater, and rakugo, as well as a number of 'alcoholic' essays and short stories. He constantly produced innovative literary works, including the Naoki Prize-winning The Night of Human Models and the Eiji Yoshikawa Prize-winning Tonight, in All the Bars, until his sudden demise (he fell down the stairs while drunk) in 2004. Ramo's legendary life story and his controversial works continue to raise eyebrows in Japan.

has been at the forefront of the Créolité movement in his native Martinique and beyond since the 1980s. He is the author of numerous books in both French and Martinican Creole, many of which have appeared in translation. Raphael currently serves as the dean of humanities and literature at the University of the French West Indies, Martinique.

's A Rebel and Her Cause was reviewed by Aamer Hussein in the April 2014 issue.

is the author of the NY Times bestselling novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, which has been translated into twenty-nine languages and is being adapted for the screen by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Larsen's essays and fiction have appeared in Tin House, one story, The Millions, and The Believer. He lives in the Hudson Valley and is working on a novel about genocide and electromagnetism.

(b. Havana, 1952) is the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, among them La gente de mi barrio (1978), Cuando una mujer no duerme (1980), Para un cordero blanco (1984); En la arena de Padua (1991), La foto del invernadero (1998), Tres maneras de tocar un elefante (2004), El libro de las clientas (2005), Catch and Release (2006), and many more.  Her 2003 mixed-genre collection Other Letters to Milena (Otras cartas a Milena) was first published in Havana by Letras Cubanas.  Rodríguez is the winner of a long series of national and international literary prizes, including two prestigious Casa de las Américas prizes for poetry in 1984 and 1998.  In 1999 she was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France.   Rodríguez continues to live and work in Havana today, where she is known for her work on behalf of alternative literary projects and spaces.

is a Russian-English translator who has translated several works by Vasily Grossman, Nikolai Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and Alexander Pushkin's Dubrovsky and The Captain's Daughter. Together with his wife, Elizabeth, and other colleagues he has co-translated numerous works by Andrey Platonov. Chandler is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov, and the author of a biography of Pushkin. He is a co-editor and co-translator of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, February 2015).

(1878–1956)—the great Swiss-German writer admired by Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin—wrote as many as eight novels (four have survived) and thousands of the short prose texts that became his trademark. Called "a clairvoyant of the small" by W. G. Sebald, Walser drafted many of his works on small slips of found paper in a pencil script so tiny that when a trove of manuscripts was discovered after his death, it was believed initially that he had been writing in secret code. Berlin Stories, a collection of his early short fiction translated by Susan Bernofsky, is forthcoming from New York Review Books Classics.

wrote Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003, which was reviewed by Sven Birkerts in the Jul 2011 issue.

was born in a small Patagonian town in 1927. The grandson of Irish immigrants, he wrote crime fiction and worked as a translator before publishing Operación Masacre in 1957. He traveled to Cuba in the midst of the revolution and launched a newspaper with Gabriel García Márquez, among others. Upon his return to Argentina in 1961, he was shunned by the journalistic community for his connections to the Cuban Revolution. In 1972, Walsh updated Operación Masacre for the fourth and final time before joining the radical Peronist group, the Montoneros, the following year. A day after submitting his now famous 1977 "Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta," Walsh was gunned down in the street by agents of the State.

is a Brazilian poet, professor and journalist. He was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, and has a Master's degree from Indiana Univeristy, USA. He is a former USIS Cultural Affairs Assistant at the US Embassy in Brazil. He is currently a visiting professor at the Ajman University, United Arab Emirates. He has published seven books of poetry and prose.

(b. 1986) lives in Paris, where she edits the London-Paris-Berlin-based arts journal A Tale of Three Cities and co-founded The Book Club - book swap parties for often more than 300 people. Last summer, her novella 'The Last Kings of Sark' won Shakespeare & Company's international Paris Literary Prize. Follow her on Twitter @rosarankingee.

is a French poet born in 1953 in France. She studied geography, and once worked as a librarian. She lives in Provence where she writes on her approach to the human being in connection with self and nature. She gives writing and listening lessons at the University of Aix-en-Provence and has created poetry workgroups at the University of Avignon. She leads writing workgroups for the association Partage d'horizons. She has been organizing writing workshops in the Sahara Desert for the association L'Ami du Vent. Caroline Calloch says of Sibille's work: "Her verses have the musical quality of a score. Language serves as a substitute for notes and forms a libretto . . . Roselyne Sibille's word music vibrates between two poetic silences." She has published several collections and collaborative works, including Lumière froissée (with paintings by Liliane-Eve Brendel), Par la porte du silence (with Bang Hai Ja), Versants and Tournoiements.

has published eight poetry collections, most recently The Mara Crossing, poems and prose on migration in the mediaeval form of the prosimetrum, a mix of poetry and philosophy; and previously Darwin – A Life in Poems, a biography in lyric poems of her great great grandfather Charles Darwin. She has also published a novel and eight works of non-fiction, including a study of rock music and Greek myth, a memoir of firsthand experience of tiger conservation, and three books on reading contemporary poetry. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Fellow and Council Member of the Zoological Society of London. Her website can be found here.

is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Dear Twin Falls (H_NGM_N, 2013). His poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary; Black Clock; Columbia Poetry Review; DIAGRAM; Forklift, Ohio; Handsome; iO: A Journal of New American Poetry; PEN Poetry Series; Spork; Transom; the Hell Yes Press cassette anthology 21 Love Poems; & many other places. He is the Executive Director of the Midwest Writing Center & an English instructor at St. Ambrose University, both in Davenport, IA. He plays drums in The Multiple Cat & curates the SPECTRA Poetry Reading Series in Rock Island, IL, where he lives.

was born in South Africa. He studied at Cambridge and Columbia and then practised as a lawyer in New York and London. His collection of stories, The Alphabet of Birds, won several prizes in Afrikaans and is published by And Other Stories in the UK and US. He lives in Cape Town and is working on a novel.

has long been a well-known figure in the Arab world. He is generally considered the leading Syrian dramatist of the twentieth century and one of the most important modern Arab dramatists. Although his most important works began to appear in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, he only began to come to Western attention near the end of his career when he was selected in 1996 by UNESCO to deliver the keynote speech on International Theatre Day. A number of his works have been published and produced in Germany and France, most notably a lavish production of Rituals of Signs and Transformations at the Comédie-Française in 2013. To date, however, only a few of his plays, primarily one-acts, have appeared in English translation.

was born in 1979 in Taipei. She graduated from National Chengchi University's Department of Philosophy and went on to work in the media. Her work includes the story collections Fallen Xiao Luren (Yuan-Liou Publishing, 2001) and Eight Flowers Blossom, Nine Seams Split (Titan Publishing, 2005), both published under the pen name Jiu Jiu; and Welcome to the Dollhouse (Unitas Publishing, 2012), in which 'The Girl of His Dreams' first appeared. Her work often addresses the theme of alienation as experienced by those in the lower classes of society. She has won virtually every major short story prize in Taiwan, including the China Times Literary Award and the United Daily Literary Award. In 2012, she was named by Unitas as one of the 20 best Sinophone writers under 40.

(real name Kawasaki Aiko) was born in 1911 in Hokkaido, Japan. In 1928 she moved to Tokyo and quickly integrated into the literary avant-garde community – she is now considered by many to be the first female Modernist poet. Stomach cancer took her life at the age of 25, at which point her poems were collected and edited by Ito Sei and published as Sagawa Chika Shishuu (Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika) by Shourinsha in 1936. Later a more complete collected works, including her prose, in memoriam writings from poets, and a complete bibliography, was published as Sagawa Chika Zenshishuu (Collected Works of Sagawa Chika) by Shinkaisha in 1983. In 2010, her Collected Poems was republished by Shinkaisha, who also in 2011 published a new book collecting Sagawa's translations from English-language poetry, including poems by Charles Reznikoff, James Joyce, and Mina Loy.

is a poet, novelist, and translator with twelve published books. Her four poetry collections include Sight May Strike You Blind (Sahitya Akademi, 2007); Absent Muses (Poetrywala, 2010); and The Scorpion (e-single, Harper21, 2013). Her novels Rupture (2009) and Land of the Well (2012) are both from HarperCollins. Dirty Love (Penguin, 2013), is her short story collection about Bombay/Mumbai; and Ela (Scholastic, 2013) is her first YA novel. Sampurna's poetry has been translated into German, Swiss-German, French, Welsh, Scots, Gaelic, Estonian, Bangla, Tamil, Kannada, Manipuri, and Bambaiyya; and her children's fiction into Welsh and Icelandic. Her translation of Sukumar Ray's Bengali poetry and prose, Wordygurdyboom!, has been a Puffin Classic since 2008. She was the 2012 Charles Wallace writer-in-residence at the University of Kent, Canterbury. For more information, visit here.

Zhuxin Zhang (b. 1992, Shanghai) is Asymptote's Chinese social media manager. She is currently based in UK, earning her M.A. in English literature at the University of Leeds. She is translating Christina Rossetti's poetry for Project Gutenberg.

is an actor by training. She organizes many readings with actors and other poets including Group of Five Women Poets Without Edith, in Paris, Athens, Marseille, and Bordeaux, and teaches writing workshops in schools, through the International Centre for Poetry Marseille (cipM). Her translations into English include work by Peter Gizzi, Lorine Niedecker, and Joan Retallack, and she is the author of four poetry collections: Point de fuite (Fidel Anthelme X, 2001), On a toujours été séparés (Fidel Anthelme X, 2005), Les miettes (les éditions précipitées, 2007), and Rappel (Bleu du ciel, 2007).

was born in 1971 and grew up in Hamburg in between the rectory of her German Protestant grandparents and the traditions of her father, a carpet dealer from Lahore, Pakistan. She studied folklore and German literature, and published three novels between 1999 and 2004: Gogo-Girl (1999), Dein Film (2001), and Eine romantische Maßnahme (2004). Her most recent book, Die Gespenster von Berlin. Unheimliche Geschichten (2009), is a collection of contemporary stories about ghosts and hauntings. Sarah Khan lives in Berlin and regularly publishes articles and essays. In October 2012 Khan won the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's Michael-Althen-Preis für Kritik for an essay about the TV series House. Find her online here.

is a contributing editor at Asymptote. She holds M.A. degrees in Art History and Japanese Literature (Waseda University, Japan), certificates in Photography and Film (Art and Architecture School, Waseda University, Japan) and Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language (IIEL, UK). Born and raised in Shizuoka, Japan, she is currently living and working in London (UK) and Padua (Italy).

(born 1929) was born and educated in the Hungarian community of Transylvania, Romania. He published his first poem at the age of eighteen and has since produced numerous volumes of poetry and translation, garnering every important prize in Romania and Hungary as well as the prestigious Herder Prize in Vienna. Kányádi's work has been translated into most European languages. Translator Paul Sohar has introduced him to the English-speaking world with two selected volumes of poetry, Dancing Embers (Twisted Spoon Press, 2002) and In Contemporary Tense (Iniquity Press, 2013). 

was born in 1974, and started out in theatre in Lyons, where he worked as an author, director, and actor. His first novel, Marabout d'ficelle (Éditions du Rouergue, 2002), won the J'aime lire prize (a national prize voted for by children) that year. He then left the theatre to concentrate on writing.

He has since published poetry and more novels, and his plays have been published by Editions Espaces 34 (Des lambeaux noirs dans l'eau du bain, Désarmés and Le petit matin de mourir). Six of his plays have appeared in two collections by Color Gang Edition in 2007: Trop tard c'est bientôt and Dans quels déserts tu ranges tes soifs?

En bas c'est moi (It's Me Down There) was translated into English by Simon Pare with a grant from the SACD and read at the 2008 hotINK International Play Reading Festival in New York.

Joanniez lives in the Ardèche, in the south of France.

is the author of three poetry volumes from P.O.L.—Un temps pour s'étreindre (2011), Beau voir (2008), and Mon Laurent (2003). He founded éditions rup&rud, whose chapbook series has been reprinted by Éditions de l'Attente as rup&rud: l'intégrale, 1999-2004 (2009). The recipient of numerous awards, including a Bourse de découverte from the Centre national du Livre and a fellowship from the Conseil Régional d'Île de France, he participated in the Mission Stendhal sponsored by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs. He has translated several American poets into French. A psychoanalyst, Smirou has contributed essays to psychoanalytical texts, canonical and contemporary alike, including Sándor Ferenczi's Un petit homme-coq (2012) and Franck Médioni's Albert Ayler: Témoignages sur un holy ghost (2010). He authored the preface to a new Freud translation, Le petit Hans (2011), and translated Antonino Ferro's Rêveries from the Italian, which just appeared in 2012. Smirou co-directs the journal LIGNE 13.

is a poet, prose writer, columnist, and editor. Before the war in Bosnia, he made a name for himself writing poetry and working for newspapers and magazines. Soon after the war he emigrated to the United States, where he still lives and works. He is the co-founder of two influential magazines and the author of several books, most notably Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias. His works have been translated into almost forty languages.

is originally from Argentina, and has published numerous works of fiction, poetry, and essays. Among his grants and prizes, he has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in 2007 and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2000. His books have been translated into French, German, and Portuguese. He teaches in the Creative Writing in Spanish Program at NYU. His novels My Two Worlds, The Dark, and The Planets have been published in translation by Open Letter Books.

was born in 1689 in Hala Haveli's village Sui-Qandar, near Hyderabad in Pakistan. He is considered one of the greatest poets in the Sindhi language.

are written up in Christian Smith's essay, Choosing the Wrong Casket, in the October issue.

(1902-1988) is one of the most influential writers in China's modern history. His Border Town, banned under Mao's regime, inspired the new generation of Chinese writers in the late-twentieth century, and was named the best novel in Yazhou Zhoukan's 1999 list of 100 best works of literature of 20th century China.

(1951-2010) had his education at Tsinghua University High School cut short by the Cultural Revolution, and in 1969 he was sent to work in the countryside in Shaanxi as part of the 'Up to the Mountains, Down to the Countryside' movement. It was there that he sustained the injury to his spine that eventually resulted in his paralysis. His best-known works include the essay 'Ditan and Me'; the novella 'Life on a String' (made into a movie by Chen Kaige in 1991); and the novel Jottings on Principles.

(1931–1986) was a central figure in the Nai Kavita movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Bilaspur, he did his Masters in Hindi from Nagpur University in 1956, and then moved to New Delhi, where he worked in journalism and politics. Verma served as special correspondent for Dinman, a major Hindi periodical, from 1966 to 1977. In 1976, he was elected a member of the Rajya Sabha on a Congress ticket, and served as spokesman of the party through the late 1970s to the early 80s. He published two collections of short fiction, a novel, a travelogue, literary interviews, essays and five collections of poetry. Verma was a visitor at the Iowa International Writing Program twice (1970–1971 and 1978), and won the Tulsi Puraskar (1976), the Kumaran Asan Award, and the Sahitya Akademi Award (posthumously, for Magadh, in 1987).

(1876-1927) was an Armenian poet who catalyzed the development of socialist and feminist poetry before Armenia became part of the Soviet Union in 1920. She is the author of Arshaluysi ghoghanjner (Ringing of the Dawn, 1907), which included poems that referred to the failed Revolution of 1905 in Imperial Russia. Later poems were rejected and barred from publication by tsarist censorship after the appearance of her first book. They were published posthumously during the Soviet period.

(1903–1979) was a poet, painter, art critic, and one of the most prominent Surrealists in Japan. He introduced and actively promoted the works of André Breton, Max Ernst, and other European Surrealists through translation and criticism. He also helped revive the avant-garde scene in postwar Japan by spearheading an interdisciplinary art group called Jikken Kobo ("Experimental Workshop") which was active from 1951 to 1957. His first collection of poems, The Poetic Experiments of Shuzo Takiguchi 1927–1937, was published in 1967. In the late sixties and seventies he collaborated with Joan Miró on two books of poems and paintings. His fourteen-volume collected works was published between 1991 and 1998.

was a Russian and Soviet short-story writer who described himself as being "known for being unknown" and the bulk of whose writings were published posthumously.

(b. 1973) is a poet, playwright and novelist in Reykjavik. For over a decade she worked as a journalist for the Icelandic daily Morgunbladid, essentially covering the culture of the everyday. Her poetry cycle Blysfarir (Torch Marches) was nominated for the Nordic Council's Literature Prize 2009 and is now available in German under the title Fackelzüge. Poems by Thrastardóttir have been printed in a dozen languages in anthologies and literary journals throughout Europe. Her latest poetry volume Brúður (Bride) includes a series of poems on weddings and her forthcoming novel Stekk (Jump) is firmly set in a rusty old house in Barcelona, Catalonia.

was born in 1973 in Karlsruhe, and lives in Frankfurt am Main. She studied theatre and literature studies in Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Paris, and worked at the German Institute at the Goethe University Frankfurt. She publishes reviews, poems, and short stories in journals and anthologies and has won numerous grants and awards for literature, including the Leonce-und-Lena-Prize from the city of Darmstadt. In 2006, she was a member of the jury for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. She has recently won the Hölty Prize for an unpublished book manuscript. The story "Lisa and the Heavenly Body" appeared in 2005 in a volume of short stories entitled Reiche Mädchen (Rich Girls) published by Schöffling & Co.

(c. 556–468 BCE) was a Greek lyric poet. Much of his work has been heavily fragmented or entirely lost to time. He composed in a variety of poetic forms, from the epigram to the dirge to the victory-ode, but today is perhaps best known for his epitaph for the fallen Spartans at Thermopylae.

is the author of numerous pamphlets and collections of poetry. Her latest book of poetry is Cross-Talk (Seren Books), 'which explores Ireland in the aftermath of its turbulent peace process' (Poetry). Poems are forthcoming or have appeared in journals including The Hopkins Review, Poetry Congeries, Crab Orchard Review, The Southern Review, Agenda and Poetry. Siobhan works with post-combat veterans and is the founder of the Military Writing Network. She is on Faculty at Kingston University London and directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing. Other books include Darwin among the Machines (Rack Press) and That Water Speaks in Tongues, winner of the Templar poetry award.

has translated Jerzy Ficowski's short fiction (Waiting for the Dog to Sleep, Twisted Spoon Press, 2006), Wojciech Jagielski's reportage (Towers of Stone, Seven Stories Press, 2009), and a novel (I Burn Paris, Twisted Spoon, 2011) and a short-story/manifesto anthology (The Legs of Izolda Morgan, Twisted Spoon, 2012) by the inter-war Catastrophist/Futurist Bruno Jasieński. He has also published two books of short fiction, and has a short novel soon to be published.

(b. 1938) is one of the exponents of the Akavita movement in Hindi. Luqman Ali Tatha Anya Kavitayen, his best known book, is widely regarded as a landmark work in Hindi literature. Mohan is also an accomplished translator, and has been associated in various capacities with major literary institutions of India. He lives in New Delhi.

was born in Poland behind the Iron Curtain and emigrated to Austria as a child. His work has been published in German-language journals and anthologies, including, most recently, the 2011 edition of the Jahrbuch der Lyrik (Best German Poetry) and Ort der Augen. His blog Postkarten an Michail Gorbatschow enjoyed a cult following during the time of its publication and has recently been released as an art book.

(1842-1898) was an English teacher who in his spare time became instrumental behind the scenes of France's dynamic 19th-century artistic movement. A significant aspect of his achievement was the way he had been able to blend French lyricism with reading strategies learned from Japanese art. A visionary, he had wished to bring many languages together at once with his poetry, an aim that resonates with our more tightly wound world in which not any single language rules.

(b. 1980) lives in Cluj-Napoca, Romania and is the editor in chief of the Romanian e-zine EgoPHobia. He has a PhD in Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Cluj-Napoca and has had research stays in Oslo and Munich. He also has two BAs in Philosophy and European Studies and an MBA in American Studies. He is the recipient of sixteen national prizes of poetry and his texts have been translated into English, German, French and Portuguese. He has published four books in Romanian.

wrote Beware of Pity, reviewed in the Apr 2012 issue.

is the author and translator of the poem 'Deer,' taken from his collection Maschere d'oro (Golden Masks), Biblioteca Cominiana, 1997. In collaboration with the Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi, he has translated a selection of Mirza Ghalib's ghazals into Italian for 'Pagine,' reading them at the Italian Embassy Culture Institute, Delhi, in 2006. He is currently translating Heian waka into English and Italian along with a Japanese scholar who does not wish to be named. Steven Greico is married, with two children. Currently he lives between Rome and Jaipur.

(b. 1969) is a poet and professor of foreign languages at Nanjing University of Finance and Economics. Originally from the northeast of China, she studied at the Qiqihar Normal University, Heilongjiang University, and Nanjing University. In 2003 she was a visiting researcher at the University of Waterloo. She did her postdoctorate at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Her first collection of poetry Cruel Crow, co-authored with Feng Dong, was published in 2011.

has done a variety of jobs since graduating—security guard at a cement factory, waiter, factory operator, technician in pesticides factory. He sent "Periscope" to Chutzpah's founder and editor, Ou Ning, on spec, and it appeared in issue 7 of this independent Chinese magazine (spring 2012). Born in 1986 in Shandong province, Sun Yisheng featured as one of three young writers at a Chutzpah "Literary New Blood" event in Beijing on September 9, 2012. He has had short stories published in several mainstream literary journals and now edits an online journal.

is a renowned Paris-based contemporary writer and photographer, and currently professor of photography at the European Graduate School EGS. Suzanne Doppelt studied philosophy and became a teacher of literature and philosophy in Paris. It was during her time as a philosophy and literature teacher that she became interested in photography and decided to pursue a second career as a photographer. This decision led to a new picto-literary style in her work, which can be seen in her books Totem (2002), Quelque chose cloche (2004), La 4e des plaies vole (2004), and Le pré est vénéneux (2007). Suzanne Doppelt also works on ghosts and what the fantastic logic of their appearances and disappearances might imply for an economy of the living.

was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1963. She is a poet, novelist, translator and networker. Geist studied literature and art history as well as chemical sciences, a combination with a beneficial effect towards her understanding of literature. In her work science and poetry constantly seem to reflect each other. She has published five volumes of poetry and two books of prose. She has edited several anthologies of Eastern European literature and is also known as a translator. She translated Chirikure Chirikure's first German collection Aussicht auf eigene Schatten. Sylvia Geist has received numerous awards for her work, including the Meran Poetry Prize, a fellowship at the Künstlerhaus Edenkoben, the Adolf Mejstrik Award of the German Schiller Foundation and a Sylt-Quelle residential fellowship.

is a Franco-Senegalese writer of poetry and fiction. Her first book, Lagon, lagunes, was praised by the renowned Francophone writer Edouard Glissant, while her second, La Quête infinie de l'autre rive: épopée en trois chants, was a finalist for two French literary awards, the Mahogany Prize and the Prix des Découvreurs. The work also appeared on the practice exam of the French baccalaureate. This is the first lengthy translation of Sylvie's work to appear in English.

(Fehérgyarmat, Hungary, 1963–2014) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important poets to emerge in post-1989 Hungary. He worked in a wide variety of genres, including the essay, drama, and short fiction, and was the recipient of many highly prestigious literary prizes in his native Hungary. From the beginning, with his widely acclaimed Hosszú nap el (Long Day Away, 1992), Borbély pushed the Hungarian language to its utmost breaking point in the service of a vision that, while profoundly and theologically searching, fully embraces the peculiar condition of post-late-Modernity. At once deeply philosophical and relentlessly concrete, Borbély's unique poetic language places him in the legacy of other great central European thinkers such as János Pilinszky and Vladimír Holan.

is an emerging writer and translator of fiction. Her work has appeared in Fringe Magazine; Kalliope, a Journal of Women's Art; Fiction Fix; and the finalist list of Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers. One of her stories received Fiction Fix's Readers' Choice Award. Her translations include a novel by the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

Born to a Sudanese father and Egyptian mother, Hassabo spent her earlier years at different points along the Nile Valley. Upon finishing high school, she traveled to the UK, where she started her college education then completed it in Athens, Greece. She then relocated to the United States, where she attended Columbia University's M.F.A. program in New York. She spent many years working and traveling as an international development expert on the Middle East and North Africa. She currently lives in Columbia, Maryland, and is devoted to writing fiction full-time.

Zhuxin Zhang (b. 1992, Shanghai) is Asymptote's Chinese social media manager. Currently based in the UK, she is earning her M.A. in English literature at the University of Leeds and translating Christina Rossetti's poetry for Project Gutenberg.

is an actor and playwright, who has held leading roles in productions at the Palestinian National Theatre in Jerusalem, the Al-Kassaba Theatre in Ramalla, and the Hebrew theatre in Jaffa, as well as roles in films such as The Olive Harvest, The Moon Sinking, and I Frank. As a playwright he has written three plays: In Spitting Distance, a play published in French and produced in Palestine, Belgium and France, as well as Both Upon a Time and Sea Wall. He regularly gives lectures and debates around the world on the topic of political theatre.

was born in 1937 and is one of Japan's most prominent living poets. Since first attracting the attention of the Japanese literary world with his bold poetic evocations of homoerotic desire in the 1960s, he has published over two dozen anthologies of poetry and several dozen volumes of poetry and literary criticism. Five anthologies of his poetry are available in English translation, including Sleeping, Sinning, Falling (New Directions, 1992) and On Two Shores (Dedalus, 2006). His memoirs, Twelve Views from the Distance is forthcoming in 2012 from the University of Minnesota Press.

was born in Singapore. He is an Assistant Professor of the Chinese Division in National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.  His current research interests are Singapore Chinese literature and literary pedagogy. He was educated in Singapore, Taiwan and the UK. Tan's Chinese publications include Chi-Chu Cheng Xing (poetry, 1997), The Four Books (The Four Books, prose, 1999), A Poetry Collection (1999), Ge An Guan Wo (critical works and essays, 2000), Zao Jian Di (Where Swords are Forged, poetry, 2002), Sir's Homework (prose and short story, 2004) and The Yellow Raincoat (prose, 2006). Tan has won various prizes in competitions on prose, poetry, novel and literary criticism in Taiwan and Singapore. He was awarded the Young Artist Award by National Arts Council in 2004 and the Singapore Youth Award (Art and Culture) in 2006 for his literary and pedagogical achievements.

was born in Singapore. He travelled abroad for education and work and is trained in photography and cinematography. He writes for screen and stage and is currently a producer with national broadcaster.

was born in 1988 in Banjaluka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She received her B.A. in dramaturgy from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Serbia, receiving the distinction of highest-ranked student in her class. She has published a book of short stories, Room on the Third Floor (2010, Knjizevna Omladina Srbije), and the plays How Much is Pate (published in Scena Magazine and in a collection of Serbian plays published by the Heartefact Fund, Belgrade) and Scratching or How My Grandmother Killed Herself (Teatron Magazine). How Much is Pate was produced in Belgrade's Atelje 212, directed by Snežana Trisic in January 2012. Scratching... was produced in September 2012 (Bosnian National Theatre, Bitef Theatre, and Heartefact Fund, directed by Selma Spahic). Šljivar has won the Slobodan Selenić and Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz awards for playwriting. In 2012, her script for the short film Something Sweet (directed by Jelena Gavrilovic) premiered in the Sarajevo Film Festival.

(1957) is a pioneering poet, graphic artist, and musician. He grew up in Tórshavn, the capital city of the Faroe Islands, during a period of intense socioeconomic and cultural transition. Since his literary debut in Varðin, Poulsen has published nearly forty books and become an inimitable force in Nordic literature. His colorful reading style and rebellious alter ego, The Garage God, have earned him a reputation as the "Punk Poet" of the Faroe Islands. He has twice received the M.A. Jacobsen Literature Award and recently won the Faroe Islands' most prestigious cultural prize, Mentanarvirðisløn Landsins. Katrin Ottarsdóttir's film, A Line A Day Must Be Enough (2008), documents the day-to-day life of Tóroddur Poulsen as well as his complicated relationship with his native archipelago.

was born in Mexico City in 1959. She has published ten books of poetry, several of which have received national prizes in Mexico: Cinco estaciones; Un lugar ajeno; Segunda persona (Premio Nacional de Poesía Efraín Huerta); Glosas; Horas; Luz por aire y agua; Un jardín, cinco noches (y otros poemas); Contracorriente (Premio Nacional de Literatura José Fuentes Mares); Parafrasear; and Muerte en la rúa Augusta (Premio Xavier Villaurrutia). Her most recent book is a collection of essays, Libro de las explicaciones (Editorial Almadía, 2012).

was born in Prague. She graduated with a degree in Czech studies and French from the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. In 2007 she was awarded a doctorate in Czech from Charles University. For several years she was a lecturer in Czech language and literature at the Slavonic Department of the Sorbonne in Paris. Her poetry collections include Pařížský deník (2013), Don Vítor si hraje jiné básně (2009), Velká biskupovská noc (2005), Podoba panny pláč (2002), and Modrá jablka (2000). She owns the publishing house Literární salon and works as vice-director of the Museum of Czech Literature. 

(b. 1984) is a Danish poet and a 2009 graduate of the Danish school of authors, Forfatterskolen. His first collection of poetry, Yeahsuiten, was published that same year. It earned the grant Bodil og Jørgen Munch-Christensens Kulturlegat in 2010 as well as a nomination for the award Montanaprisen. Ørntoft's second collection of poetry, Digte 2014, which came out earlier this year, just won the prestigious Michael Strunge Prize.

(1931–1989) grew up in Salzburg and Vienna, where he studied music. In 1957, he began a second career as a playwright, poet and novelist. He went on to win many of the most prestigious literary awards of Europe (including the Austrian State Prize, the Bremen and Brüchner Prizes and Le Prix Séguier) and was one of the most widely admired writers of his generation.

is among the most influential of contemporary Russian poets. He was born in 1955 and began publishing his poems in the 1980s. In the late Soviet period he was closely associated with underground poets like Lev Rubinstein, Dmitri Prigov, and Sergey Gandlevsky. Critics often identify his work with postmodernism and conceptualism. He is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including When Lenin Was Young (1995), Amour, exil (2000), and In the Margins of "A Shropshire Lad" (2007). Kibirov has won many honors, including the Anti-Booker Prize (1997) and Russia's prestigious "Poet" prize (2008). In a recent interview Kibirov said, "The only thing that a poet needs to do is write good poems. What this means, I can't begin to judge; no one can know this, there are no criteria . . . And whether a poet uses Old Church Slavonic or the current slang is simply a matter of technique."

teaches creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His first collection of short stories, The Task of This Translator, was published in 2005. His debut novel, Captives, appeared in 2008. His translation of Asaf Schurr's novel Motti was shortlisted for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

was born in 1972 in Sapporo. He received his Ph.D from Tokyo University for an interdisciplinary study on natural languages. After several years as a physics researcher, EnJoe became a full-time writer in 2007 after the publication of his debut works, Of the Baseball and Self-Reference ENGINE. He engages, with no particular bias, in the genres of literary fiction, SF, and horror. In 2012, he won the Akutagawa Prize for Harlequin's Butterfly. Toh EnJoe is a pseudonym taken from a short story of his supervisor at Tokyo University, Prof. Kunihiko Kaneko. EnJoe's real name is unknown.

is the author of Roithamer's Universe, Dolls, and The Birth of Death and Other Comedies: The Novels of Russell H. Greenan. His fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translations have appeared in Agni, Bookforum, Chicago Review, The Hopkins Review, Fiction International, Film Quarterly, Georgia Review, Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He teaches American literature at Freiburg University and film at the State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart, Germany. His novel The President in Her Towers: A Report is forthcoming from Ellipsis Press.

lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He taught Spring semester 2011 at the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas. His recent books translated into English are Woods and Chalices (Harcourt 2008), Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, second edition 2008) and There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair (Couterpath Press, 2009). His Blue Tower is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Fall 2011.

was born in 1938 in Raggsjö, Västerbotten. He is one of Sweden's most loved and admired novelists and poets. Lindgren's major breakthrough was the novel The Way of the Serpent, published in 1982, adopted for the screen for years later by Bo Widerberg. The novel depicts life, poverty, oppression and faith in a village in northern Sweden, a landscape that he returns to in many of his works. Lindgren has been a member of the Swedish Academy since 1991, and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Umeå and Linköping.

was born in Yokohama in 1973 and formed the theater company chelfitsch in 1997. He has written and directed all of the company's productions practicing a distinctive methodology, and has come to be known for his hyper-colloquial language and unique choreography. In 2005, Five Days in March won the prestigious 49th Kishida Drama Award. In 2007 his collection of novels The End of the Special Time We Were Allowed was awarded the Kenzaburo Oe Prize. His work has been presented at numerous venues in Japan and abroad such as Nam June Pike Art Center (Seoul), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), KUNSTEN FESTIVAL DES ARTS (Brussels), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), and Festival d'Automne (Paris). His novels and plays have been published in Japan and abroad in translation. His work will be presented in Los Angeles in June 2011 as part of the Radar L.A. festival.

(born July 4, 1965) is an American playwright and actor who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play August: Osage County.

is a German poet and translator based in Brooklyn and Berlin. She published four books of poetry, among them SONNE FROM ORT, a collaborative erasure with Christian Hawkey (kookbooks, Berlin), and three chapbooks translated into English, my cadastre (Nor By Press), false friends (UDP) and aliens, an island (Belladonna*). A Spanish selection of her work, Fronteras del lenguaje, was published with La Bella Varsovia/ Cosmopoètica. Wolf translates numerous poets into German, among them Matthea Harvey, Christian Hawkey, Erín Moure, and Cole Swensen, and was the co-editor of the Jahrbuch der Lyrik 2009.

was born in Großenhain (GDR) in 1979 and now lives in Leipzig and Berlin. She started publishing her poetry by pasting poems onto construction fences and spreading them on flyers and free post cards. After completing her Magister in Religious Studies and Modern Indology, she graduated from the German Creative Writing Program Leipzig. Three volumes of her poetry have been published to date. Previous publications include radio plays and audio-books of poetry and pop music.

was born in 1962 in Munich, Germany, and is one of the country's most prominent authors. Draesner has won many literary awards including the Joachim-Ringelnatz-Prize for Poetry 2014, the Roswitha Prize 2013, the Bremer Netzresidenz 2013, and the Solothurner Literature Prize 2010. Draesner is a poet, a writer of long and short fiction, and a translator of French and Anglo-American poetry, including Gertrude Stein's First Reader, H. D.'s Hermetic Definition, and Louise Glück's Averno and The Wild Iris. She has been awarded poetic readerships at Middlebury College (US), the Universities of Kiel, Birmingham, Mainz, and Bamberg, and sometimes teaches as a professor of creative writing at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut Leipzig. The poems here are from subsong, her most recent book of poetry (Luchterhand, 2014). Additional information about Draesner's writing can be found on her website and on Facebook.

was born in 1976 in Wiesbaden, Germany. She studied dramaturgy at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Leipzig and worked for several years as an assistant to the director at Schauspiel Leipzig. Since 2003, she has lived as a freelance writer in Hamburg, Germany. Syha has won several awards and stipends, including a fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2006/2007), the Hamburger Förderpreis für Literatur (2010), and the Robert-Gernhardt-Preis (2014). She was writer-in-residence at Nationaltheater Mannheim (2009/2010), and has been invited to the renowned Mülheimer Dramatikertage twice (2003 and 2009). Syha's plays, radio dramas, and translations are published by Rowohlt Theater Verlag, Reinbek, Germany.

(b. 1973) has published five volumes of poetry: sonata pentru cornet de hîrtie (sonata for paper horn), 2005 and 2006; Dicţionar de vise (A Dictionary of Dreams), 2006; Lucian (un experiment) (Lucian – an experiment), 2009; and Toţi sunt îngrijoraţi (Everybody's Worried) ; 2010. He is a founding member of the experimental literary group Celebrul animal (The Celebrated Animal) and of the literary magazine Ca și Cum (As If).

is a French writer, born in Grasse (French Riviera) in 1974. After studying at Sciences Po in Paris, she spent three years in Hanoi and Manila, where she worked with humanitarian organizations helping street children. She published her first novel, The Sensitive Note, with Gallimard in 2002. For eight years she taught French literature and theater in secondary school before dedicating herself to writing and various book-related projects: workshops, talks, conferences, writing residencies at schools, libraries and universities. She currently teaches literature and writing workshops at Sciences Po. Her ninth novel, Kinderzimmer (Actes Sud, 2013) recently won the prestigious "Prix des Libraires" (bookseller's prize).

is a poet and a painter. She is the author of the books of poetry de la ola, el atajo (2009), Geografías de Niebla (2008), Esta Novela Azul (2004), and Ante el Ojo del Cíclope (2000). For her book De Elefante a Elefante, she was awarded the International Award "Gerardo Diego 1966" by the Spanish Government. In collaboration with Jennifer Clement she translated Tremble, Temblar by C.D Wright; and with E.M Test she translated Apalaquia, Apalachia by Charles Wright, Torn Awake, Arrancado del Sueño by Forrest Gander (2005), and The Zoo Father, El Padre Zoológico by Pascale Petit (2005). In 2010 her translation of selected poems Libretto para Eros by Forrest Gander appeared in Amargord, Spain. In Chile Ligaduras/Ligatures (2012) by Forrest Gander appeared in a bilingual version with her paintings.

(1479–1531 CE) is a prominent figure associated with the bhakti (devotional) movement in 15th CE India. Author of commentaries on Sanskrit texts including the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, he founded the devotional Pushti-marg in India, with its devotion to Krishna, especially baby Krishna.

in this issue include Khin Aung Aye, Maung Chaw Nwe, Eaindra and Pandora.

Khin Aung Aye was born in 1956 in Rangoon where he was raised and attended the university. He  has published 11 collections of poetry, which include collaborations with leading poets and translators from Burma, like Zeyar Lynn and his own cousin and early teacher Maw Rousseau. He is regarded as one of the great modern poets of Burmese poetry yet his style emerged from close readings of the old masters in Burma, like Dagon Taya and—in the 1980s—the workshops of Maung Tha Noe. In his early formation as a poet, Khin Aung Aye stuck to four-syllable verse, before becoming influenced by modernism (publishing significantly with leading modernist publisher Moe Way). He lives in Bangkok and has recently read his work in England, Finland and at literary festivals in South Korea.

Maung Chaw Nwe was born in Rangoon in 1949. From an early age, he lived in Pyay, formerly known as Prome, a port town on the Irrawaddy bank, 160 miles northwest of the capital.  At twenty, a year after his first poem appeared in Thriller magazine in Rangoon, he told his father who was a district commissioner, 'Dad, there isn't any world-famous landowner, there isn't any world-famous district commissioner, there are only world-famous poets and writers.' In the 1970s, he travelled to Rangoon 'a million times' to mingle with poets. The same decade saw his formative books, Cruel Music on Dead Leaves (1974, both collaborations with Aung Chemit and Phaw Way), The Whining of the Inner Truth (1976) and The Day Maung Chaw Nwe was Had (1979), followed by Upper Class Water (1980) and Maung Chaw Nwe, the Fake (1994) and Train (1994), a collection of five long verses.  A flamboyant troubadour all through his career, Maung Chaw Nwe famously said 'I've never thought of living life moderately.' To him, poetry is 'a karmic disorder and a leprosy of retribution.'  Maung Chaw Nwe's untimely death in 2002 is considered one of the worst blows to contemporary Burmese poetry. He is survived by his wife, Myint Myint Sein, and three children.

Eaindra was born in the Irrawaddy delta in 1973 and is now a 'temporary resident' in Singapore. Since publishing her first chapbook at twenty Eaindra has become regarded as one of the most outstanding Burmese poets of her generation. She is an active and prolific blogger, contributing to significant Burmese magazines inside and outside Burma. Since 1996, she has published fifty poems and fifteen short stories in print media inside Burma. Her first collected book of poems is imminent and will be published in Rangoon. She is a founding member of the Aesthetic Light Foundation, a charity that aims to promote the wellbeing of Burmese writers living in Burma.

Pandora was born in 1974 in Burma delta. As an English major at Rangoon University, she wrote poems and short stories for the campus magazines under several pen names, all of which she has now forgotten. She took a hiatus from writing when she came to Singapore to study in 2001 but bounced back on the scene in early 2007 as literary blogger Pandora. Since then her poems, essays and short stories have been seen in online Burmese journals and books and in printed media inside Burma. Recently she has returned to Rangoon for a change after a ten-year spell in Singapore.

in this issue include Perumpatamanar, Kapilar, Avaiyyar, Vaayilantevanar and Allur Nanmullayar.

for 'A Sinophone "20 under 40"' in this case include Zhu Youxun (on Gan Yaoming), Ding Yungong (on Wang Congwei), Chih-Ying Lay (on Gao Yifeng), Sheng Haowei (on Zhang Yixuan) and Zhang Li (on Lu Min).

Zhu Youxun (b. 1988) is currently engaged in graduate studies at the National Tsinghua University's Institute of Taiwan Literature and is a member of the Cardinal Tien Youth Writing Association. He has previously won the Lin Rung-san Prize for Literature, the Chuchien Prize for Literature, the National Student Prize for Literature, the TSMC Young students Prize for Literature, and the Lin Yutang Literature Prize. He is also a recipient of the National Arts Council's Creative Grant.

He has gradually become accustomed to, and even grown to enjoy the many mistakes made in readings and writings about his works. He has had a novel mistaken for a dissertation, a review of literature taken for couplet chapters, poetry for letters, essays for drama, and so on. Author of two short story collections Mistaken Delivery and E Guan, he edited Taiwan's 1980s Golden Canon of Fiction.

Ding Yungong (b. 1976) has received the Times Literary Award, the United Daily News Prize for Literature and the National Students Prize for Literature. His work appears across a variety of different publications. He has given a long service to social movements and political groups and currently acts as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party, as well as being on the board of several non-governmental organizations.

Chih-Ying Lay (b. 1981) has been awarded the Baodao Literary Prize, the Lin Rung-san Literary Prize, the Taiwan Creative Writing Course Prize. His work has also been selected for several annual anthologies. He is the author of the short story collection Fugitive.

Sheng Haowei (b. 1988) is currently double majoring in Japanese and Chinese at National Taiwan University. She has been awarded Jianguo High School's Literary Prize, the TSMC Youth Literary Prize (Fiction), and the NTU Literary Prize. Her work is available on her blog, "clouds nearing sunset".

Zhang Li obtained her PhD degree from Beijing Normal University and is currently a professor at Tianjin Normal University. Her main research areas are Chinese Contemporary Literature and Contemporary Literary Criticism, as well as feminist literature and culture. She has published many articles and a major monography on feminist writing.

for "A Sinophone '20 under 40'" in this case include Shen Xiaofeng (on Xu Rongzhe), Lü Kunlin (on Zhang Yaosheng), Zhang Wanwen (on Wenren Yueyue), Mu Ye (on A Yi) and Huang Weishuang (on Gong Wanhui).

Shen Xiaofeng (b. 1984), Scorpio, real name Xu Liwei, graduated from the Institute of Creative Writing and English Literature at the National Dong Hwa University. Previously the Director General of the Gengxin Youth Writing Program, she has published two novels, Survive Back to Back and The Core of a Young Woman, and the film novelization Missing.com.

Lü Kunlin has an MA in Taiwanese Literature from Tsinghua University and is currently a PhD candidate in Taiwanese Literature at Chengchi University.

Zhang Wanwen has a solitary personality and likes to read and write. Except for animal rights activism, she is skeptical of all group activities. She is currently employed as a university foreign language teacher, specializing in the waking of slumbering schoolchildren. In 2011 she was awarded the Unitas New Writers Prize for Novellas (First Prize).

Mu Ye was born in Beijing but now lives in Shanghai. Other than conduct interviews, he writes songs and novels. He has won a China Times Literary Award for his poetry.

Huang Weishuang was born in 1981 in Malaysia, and received her Bachelor's degree from National Chengchi University's School of Finance, majoring in Business with a minor in Chinese. For her Master's degree she studied Fine Arts at the National Dong Hwa University. She has won the First Prize for Prose and Outstanding Fiction Prize in the National Chengchi University Daunan Literary Awards; the Singapore International Prize for Chinese Prose; the Malaysia Nebula Literature Award for Outstanding Prose; and has also received the Malaysia Nanyang Novel Publishing Fund. The author of Maternal Ruins and Voyeur, Huang currently works as a literary editor.

for 'A Sinophone "20 under 40"' in this case include Ma Yihang (on Egoyan Zheng), Zhu Youxun (on Tong Weige), Shen Xiaofeng (on Han Lizhu), Zheng Zhengheng (on Ge Liang) and Chen Yuxuan (on Huang Liqun).

Ma Yihang (b.1982) is of Puyuma ethnicity. He is currently a doctoral candidate in Taiwanese Literature at the National Taiwan University.

Zhu Youxun (b. 1988) is currently engaged in graduate studies at the National Tsinghua University's Institute of Taiwan Literature and is a member of the Cardinal Tien Youth Writing Association. He has previously won the Lin Rung-san Prize for Literature, the Chuchien Prize for Literature, the National Student Prize for Literature, the TSMC Young students Prize for Literature, and the Lin Yutang Literature Prize. He is also a recipient of the National Arts Council's Creative Grant.

He has gradually become accustomed to, and even grown to enjoy the many mistakes made in readings and writings about his works. He has had a novel mistaken for a dissertation, a review of literature taken for couplet chapters, poetry for letters, essays for drama, and so on. Author of two short story collections Mistaken Delivery and E Guan, he edited Taiwan's 1980s Golden Canon of Fiction.

Shen Xiaofeng was born in 1984, with the given name Xu Liwei. Star sign: Scorpio. Graduated from the National Dong Hwa University's Graduate Institute of Creative Writing and English Literature. Once served a term as head of the Geng Shen Young Writers Association. Published works include Back to Back We Live On, Young Woman, and a novelization of the movie Honey Pupu.

Zheng Zhengheng serves as Secretary of the Hong Kong Film Critics Society. Currently holds a position at the Lingnan University Centre for Humanities Research. Winner of the Global Youth Chinese Literary Award, University Literary Award, and others. Author of the multimedia collection of poetry Book Before Memory. Won Honorable Mention at the 10th Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature. Coedited Wait and See—An Anthology of Six New Hong Kong Writers. 

Chen Yuxuan is from Changhua City, Taiwan. She is a graduate from both the National Taiwan Normal University's Department of Chinese, and the National Dong Hwa University's Graduate Institute of Creative Writing and English Literature. She has been awarded the Times Literary Award, the Lin Jung-san Prize for Literature, the Religious Literature Award, and the National Student Prize for Literature, among others. Yuxuan has a passion for film and painting, and often lingers in cafes. She aspires to make an exceptional film and write a novel she feels proud of. 

for 'A Sinophone "20 under 40"' in this case include Ma Yimu (on Han Han), Jiang Yan (on Zhang Yueran), Xue Luolei (on Di An), Jiang Lingqing (on Chen Boqing) and Zhai Ao (on Yang Fumin).

Ma Yimu works in the media. Formerly the editor-in-chief of the magazine Solo Group, he has also worked for Esquire (China), among other publications.

Jiang Yan was born in the early 80's in Beijing and grew up in a military community. Jiang enjoys reading while listening to music, and also likes Taipei, Tamsui District, Renai Road (also called 3rd Blvd), Dunhua North Road (also called 12th Ave), Yongkang Street, Wenzhou Street, squirrels from Da'an Forest Park, and the homeless cat on Xinhai Road. Her favorite writers include the Chu's from Taiwan (Chu Tien-wen, Chu Tien-hsin), Tang Nuo and Janet Vincent. Jiang has always dreamt of becoming a homeless cat on Xinhai road.

Xue Luolei (b. 1988) is a teacher.

Jiang Lingqing won a scholarship from the Ministry of Education to study abroad at the University of Leicester's History of Film and Art department. Winner of the China Times Literary Prize, the Liang Shiqiu Literary Prize, the Taipei Literary Prize, the National Students Literary Award and the Digital Art Criticism Prize, as well as the recipient of grants from the National Culture and Arts Foundation in 2008 and 2009 respectively, Jiang is currently the British special correspondent for Unitas and Artist magazines. She is currently awaiting publication of her illustrated short story collection A Boy's Apartment.

Zhai Ao is a graduate student from the Taiwan University Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature.

(1905–1964) worked as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star during World War II. His vivid yet sober "The Hell of Treblinka" was translated and used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials. His novels Life and Fate and Everything Flows, and a collection of stories, journalism, and essays, The Road, are all published by NYRB Classics.

(Havana, 1955) is a poet, journalist, literary critic, translator, and scholar. Among his books are Cayama (1979), Con raro olor a mundo (1981), Noticiario del solo (1987), Cuarto de desahogo (1993), Los poemas de nadie y otros poemas (1994), El último a la feria (1995), Oración inconclusa (2000), Actas de medianoche I (2006), Actas de medianoche II (2007), tareas (2011), reversos (2011), and deshielos (2013). His work has been translated into English, Italian, French, Swedish, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, and many other languages. He has received major awards, including the David Prize (Cuba, 1980), the Plural Prize (Mexico, 1983), the EDUCA Prize (Costa Rica, 1995), the Renacimiento Prize (Spain, 2000), the Fray Luis de León Prize (Spain 2005), the Leonor Prize (Spain 2006), the Rincón de la Victoria Prize (Spain 2010), the Jaime Gil de Biedma Prize (Spain 2011), and the Alfons el Magnànim Prize (Spain 2013). In the eighties, he was the editor of El Caimán Barbudo, one of Cuba's leading cultural magazines. He has compiled three anthologies that define his poetic generation, and published various critical editions, introductions, and essays on Spanish American poets. Among his translations are books by Mark Strand, Margaret Randall, and John Kinsella. He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is currently Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.

is a third-generation native of St. Petersburg (Russia) and has been a New Yorker for over two decades. She is the founder of the Vica Miller Literary Salons, a bi-monthly chamber reading series held in NYC art galleries. Her work has appeared in Vogue Russia, Matador, and in The Jet Fuel Review literary journal, among others. Her poems were published in "Big Little World", a book of paintings by Alexander Zakharov, in 2003. She has recently finished her first novel, Inga's Zigzags. When not writing fiction, Vica works as a Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications at DataArt, a global technology company. She holds a Master's degree in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

(1893–1984) was a leading figure in the Russian Formalist movement of the 1910s and 1920s. His work has had a profound impact on twentieth-century Russian literature and on literary criticism throughout the world. Many of his books have been translated into English and are available from Dalkey Archive Press.

(1907-1972) has been referred to as "France's greatest unknown writer." Admired by Jean Genet, Nathalie Sarraute and Albert Camus, Leduc was championed by Simone de Beauvoir when she published her scandalous autobiography La Batarde (1964). Like Therese and Isabelle, many of her audacious novels are largely inspired by her life. She is the subject of Martin Provost's recent biopic, "Violette."  

(1893 - 1930) was born in Baghdati, Georgia. When his father died in 1906, he moved with his family to Moscow. He began to compose poetry following one of his arrests for political activity, during a period of solitary confinement in 1909. The 1912 Futurist publication A Slap in the Face of Public Taste contained Mayakovsky's first published poems, along with the influential manifesto of that name. Mayakovsky, along with his mentor and so-called "father of Russian Futurism," David Burlyuk, were expelled from the Moscow Art School in 1914 for their political activities. As a trained visual artist, Mayakovsky made significant contributions to theater, cinema, and particularly to early Soviet propaganda poster art and as editor of the Constructivist journal LEF. Mayakovsky's final work, his famous suicide note, reads: "The love boat has smashed up against the rocks of life."

was born in 1966 in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). In 1971 his family began an immigration odyssey from the Soviet Union to Israel, Austria, the Netherlands, and the United States (New York and Boston), before finally returning to Austria. Vladimir Vertlib studied political economics at the University of Vienna. He has worked as a freelance journalist, an insurance actuary, and a bank analyst. In 1993, he wholly dedicated himself to writing. His first book was published in 1995, his tenth (and eighth work of fiction) is scheduled to appear in 2015. He has received a number of fellowships and prestigious literary awards, including the 2001 Adelbert von Chamisso Promotional Prize for non-native authors of literary works in German. His works have been or are currently being translated into French, Italian, Russian, Czech, and Slovenian. Vladimir Vertlib now lives in Salzburg.

(1934-2009), a lifelong resident of Moscow, became active in the literary and artistic underground in the late 1950s. Through the fall of the Soviet Union, his work only appeared in samizdat and European publications. Nekrasov was associated with the experimental and innovative Lianozovo group of writers and artists, and through this affiliation went on to become one of the founding members of Moscow Conceptualism. Nekrasov's poetry, which is often characterised as minimalist, uses repetition and paranomasia to deconstruct and recontextualize his linguistic environment—he targets everything from stock Soviet political mottos to clichés people mutter to one another in everyday situations. His ground-breaking work and his long tenure in the Russian poetry community made him an influential figure for both his peers and subsequent generations of Russian poets.

was born on June 25, 1980 in Varanasi. Besides writing poetry, he writes reviews and criticism, and has translated works by Edward Said, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Harold Pinter, Howard Zinn, and Eliot Weinberger's book What I Heard About Iraq into Hindi. He was awarded the Ankur Mishra Smriti Puraskar in 2008.

is a university professor and literary critic who began writing novels relatively late in his career, in his late forties. His technique has consistently been autofiction, and his themes have been television, sex, and the commodification of human experience. In his academic and critical career, he has focused on Neorealism, contemporary Italian poetry, and specifically the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Eugenio Montale, and Sandro Penna. His most highly acclaimed novel was Troppi paradisi, which explores the metaphysics and phenomenology of television, a boundless and imaginary cave of treasures, of "too many paradises," as the title indicates. He edited the complete works of Pasolini (published by Mondadori). He is the recipient of various literary awards, the culmination being the Premio Strega and the Premio Mondello for Resistere non serve a niente (Resistance Is Futile) in 2013.

(1943–2003) was a Syrian-Brazilian poet and lyricist. His fifth book Algaravias: Câmara de Ecos won the 1995 Prêmio Jabuti, Brazil's highest literary prize.

is a seminal figure of post-60s literary L.A., and has shared the stage with such cultural icons as Timothy Leary, Alice Coltrane, Allen Ginsberg, and Los Lobos. She is the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. She has been an Emmy-winning scriptwriter, was C.O.L.A. (City of Los Angeles)'s first literary fellow, 2003, and has twice been nominated for the position of Poet Laureate of California, 2005 and 2012. She was awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize by the Poetry Society of America in May 2012. For more on Coleman visit the Poetry Foundation.

was born in Nanjing in 1954 but grew up in Shanghai. A professor of Chinese literature at Fudan University, she is from the generation of writers whose formal education was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. Among Wang's acclaimed Shanghai novels is The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1996). Voted the most influential work of the 1990s in China, it won the fifth Mao Dun Literature Award in 2000, one China's most prestigious literary prizes. As well as fiction, Wang has published essays, journalism, travel writings, literary criticism, and memoirs. In 2001 Wang was elected chairperson of the Shanghai Writers' Association.

was born in Changchun, Jilin, in 1955 and graduated from Jilin University in 1982. She moved to Shenzhen in 1985 where she now makes a living as a writer. She has taught at Hainan University and Shenzhen University. Her first book, A Selection of My Poetry, was published in 1986. She has written books of poetry, short stories, essays, and novels, and has received numerous awards, including the Chinese Literature Media Award in 2004.

is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado. He specializes in contemporary writing, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. His most recent books include Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (2003) Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (2008), and Mirror Gazing (forthcoming).

was born in Wolfhaden, Switzerland in 1930, and is considered to be one of Switzerland's foremost living lyric poets.  He has been awarded numerous prizes for his work, including the Basel Lyric Prize (2010) and the city of Basel's Literary Prize (1996).  He has published over eight collections of poetry and currently lives in Basel, where he works as a poet, artist and graphic designer. Kissing Nests (2010) is his most recent collection.

has just finished work on a book of nonfiction about the Kingdom of Lesotho, from which this chapter is taken. He has worked as a waiter, editor, homeless shelter caseworker, reporter, caddy, public radio researcher, barista, high school teacher, ghostwriter, and ghost editor, not in that order. He is currently back in the rural highlands of Lesotho with his wife and two small children. Previously, McGrath has published essays about American homelessness, the topic of a book in progress. Contact him via Twitter @wtmcgrath.

is one of the most important authors writing in Afrikaans. She has published five novels, seven collections of poems, and one play. She received the Hertzog Prize for Poetry in 1977 and again in 1992. She was awarded Italy's Grinzane Cavour Prize in 1988 for The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, soon to be published in the U.S. by Archipelago Books. Stockenström has also had a successful career as an actress on stage and in film. She lives in Cape Town.

(in Chinese: Gu Bin 顾彬) is Emeritus Professor of Chinese Studies at Bonn University and works as a translator and a writer, too. In 1985 he was appointed professor of Chinese at Bonn University. At first he worked at the Department of Oriental Languages where he was in charge of the Chinese section. 1995 till 2011 he has been the head of the Department of Chinese Studies. Since 1989 he has been editing the journals Orientierungen. Zeitschrift zur Kultur Asiens and minima sinica. Zeitschrift zum chinesischen Geist. Since 2002 he has been writing and editing the history of Chinese literature Geschichte der chinesischen Literatur, which is intended to comprise ten volumes. Wolfgang Kubin focuses on Chinese literature and the intellectual history of imperial and modern China. For his scholarly and literary work as well as in the field of translation he was awarded several prizes and honorary professorships.

is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature of Cultural Studies at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. He is a two-time winner of the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature (poetry and fiction). Wong is also the author a number of Chinese poetry collections, novels, essays, and works of literary criticism.

("Dancing Crane"), penname of Chen Guocheng (b. 1951), known for his unique, uncompromising prose style, is one of Taiwan's most critically acclaimed contemporary writers.  His works deal with issues of Taiwanese culture and identity. Among his favorite subject matters is the experience of the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan—he has spent extended periods of time living and doing research in mountain communities. His novel, Remains of Life (Yusheng), published in 2000, concerns the lives of the survivors of the 1930 Wushe Incident—most recently dramatized in Wei Te-Sheng's Seediq Bale—and has been called one of the most important works of modern Taiwanese literature. His most recent novel, Confusion (Luanmi), is the first volume of a sweeping historical study and has been compared to the work of Joyce and Proust. The excerpt you see here is taken from "Disinterment", first published in 1993. Translated into English for the first time, this short story represents one of Wu He's most important statements on Taiwanese identity.

is one of Taiwan's most innovative young novelists, as well as an expert on the history of Taiwanese environmental literature, which he teaches as an associate professor at National Dong Hwa University in Hualian, Taiwan. He was first recognized for two book-length works of literary essays about butterflies, Butterfly Way and Beguiled by Butterflies. In 2007, he published his first novel, Routes of Slumber, an ambitious experimental novel dealing with Taiwan's colonial past. The Man With the Compound Eyes, a metafictional ecological disaster novel, followed in 2011, along with his most recent work of fiction, Magician on the Skywalk, a collection of short stories about a childhood in the old Chung Hwa market in Taipei. Also in 2011, he published Writing to Liberate Nature, a collection of essays on the ecopolitical relevance of contemporary nature writing.

(penname of Liu Jun 刘军) was born in Jiangsu in 1963 but grew up in Beijing, where he still lives. One of contemporary China's most celebrated poets, having won the Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2001) and the Zhuang Zhongwen Prize (2003), he is also one of its most hyphenated littérateurs—teacher-essayist-translator-editor-poet—and has been described by American writer Eliot Weinberger as a "polymath, equally at home discussing the latest American poetry or Shang Dynasty numismatics." A graduate of the English dept. of Beijing University, where his thesis was on Ezra Pound's Chinese translations, he is currently employed at the Central Academy for Fine Arts in Beijing, where he was hired as an English instructor, then taught Western literature in Chinese translation, and now teaches pre-modern Chinese literature. He has taught at New York University (2007) and University of Victoria (2009), and is currently translating the work of Gary Snyder into Chinese.

is a migrant worker in Singapore. He hails from the Jiangsu province of the People's Republic of China.

is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington and also dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan. He is the author, editor, and translator of over forty books of poetry and prose. As a poet, Yang Mu demonstrates a profound knowledge of the Chinese poetic tradition, but he is also one of its foremost innovators.

(b. 1963) is a proclaimed contemporary Chinese poet and the author of a dozen books including Border Fast Train (1994), Gray Eyes (2000) and Rouge (2007). After his university studies in Chinese literature, he lived in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region for nine years and co-founded the literary journal Big Bird. In 1990, he was appointed Vice Alderman of Tahaqi Village. Since 1993, he has lived in the southern coastal city, Guangzhou and now works as the Associate Chief Editor of the Nanfang People Weekly. Also known as a poetry translator, he has introduced the writings of Osip Mandelshtam, Paul Celan, Fernando Pessoa, Gary Snyder, Charles Simic and other Western poets to Chinese readers.

is a fiction writer and translator, born in Tel Aviv to a bilingual family. She has an MFA in Fiction and Literary Translation from Columbia University. In 2011 she received the American Literary Translators' Association Fellowship. She serves as an English-language manuscript reader for the Israeli publishing house Kinneret Zmora Bitan. Her short fiction, essays, and translations have been published in Blue Stocking Society, Hot Metal Bridge, Two Lines, Words Without Borders and the New Vessel Press. Yardenne is writing a novel about fatherhood, and her past and current translation projects include Life is Good, a fictionalized memoir by Rana Werbin (available on Amazon Kindle), Eating, a play by Yaakov Shabtai, The Sequoia Children, a fantastical-historical novel by Gon Ben Ari, As a Few Days, a stage adaptation of Meir Shalev's novel and Some Day, by Shemi Zarhin, which is forthcoming from New Vessel Press.

is a Bulgarian-born, Shanghai-based playwright and performance artist. His debut play, The Walled-In Ones, premiered in Sofia in 2012 and was nominated for Best New Play the following year. His second play, Borgestriptych, premiered on Halloween night 2014 at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai, as an immersive site-specific event, both а live show and a video installation. His third text for theater, Elevation 506, will make its debut in its German translation first, in early 2015 in Vienna.

is the pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul, who was born in 1955 in the desert town of Kénadsa. As an officer in the Algerian army, he published fiction under the female name Yasmina Khadra ("green jasmine") to avoid military censorship. In 2000, he left the army and relocated in France, where in 2001 he revealed his identity. The Writer (L'écrivain) was published that year, but has not yet been translated in full. Khadra's novels The Swallows of Kabul (2006) and The Attack (2008) were each shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

is a young Taiwanese poet and award-winning filmmaker. A 2009 graduate of the Chicago Art Institute Film Studio Program, she is the author of two volumes of poetry, most recently The More Car the More Far (Taipei: Garden City Publishers). Many of her poems are inspired by dreams, both by specific dreams she has had but also by the quirky ways in which the unconscious mind composes.

is a poet, novelist, playwright and critic who has published 24 books. He received the Singapore Cultural Medallion in 2003, and his novel A Man Like Me won the National Book Development Council of Singapore's Book Award in 1988. Mr. Yeng has won the Singapore Literature Prize three times for Unrest (2004), Trivialities About Me and Myself (2008), and Studio (2012). His works have been translated into English, Malay, and Dutch. In 2013 he won the SEA Write Award.

is a theatre scenographer who leads a parallel life as a poet. Since the 1980s, she has established herself as one of the most widely read female poets in contemporary China. Born in 1956, she is the author of four books of poetry, including the national award-winning titles, See (2004) and Using Two Seas (2009). Her fifth volume, Forever Lingering, is forthcoming from the Cultural Art Press. She is known for her elegant and distilled lyrical voice, as well as her ecological awareness. Her poetry honors include the Hundred Flowers Award for Literature and the Distinguished Literary Prize from the Fujian Province. Currently serving as an active design artist at the People's Art Theatre in Fujian, she is also ranked as China's foremost theatrical stage and set designer. She lives in the southern coastal city of Fuzhou.

was born in Tokyo in 1960, educated at Waseda University and has lived in Germany since 1982, where she received her Ph.D. in German literature. She received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for The Bridegroom Was a Dog. She writes in both German and Japanese, and in 1996, she won the Adalbert-von-Chamisso Prize, a German award recognizing foreign writers for their contributions to German culture. She also received the Goethe-Medal, an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany. Her home page can be found here.

is one of Israel's leading writers. He was born in Tel Aviv in 1930. A novelist, painter and journalist, Kaniuk has published 18 novels, a memoir, six collections of stories, three books of non-fiction and five books for children and youth. He has been awarded many literary prizes, including the Ze'ev Prize for Children's literature (1980), the Prix des Droits de l'Homme (France, 1997), the President's Prize (1998), the Bialik Prize (1999), the prestigious Prix Mediterranee Etranger (2000), the Book Publishers Association's Gold Book Prize twice (2005; 2010), the Newman Prize (2006) the Kugel Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2008) and the France- Israel Foundation Award (2010). A feature film based on Adam Resurrected, directed by Paul Shrader, was released to critical acclaim in 2008. Kaniuk's books have been published abroad in 20 languages.

(1878-1942) revolutionized Japanese poetry. At the turn of the 20th century she produced an abundance of poems that would eventually be selected for a collection called Tangled Hair. Arguably, as far as form, content, and range, her rejuvenation of what had become a conventional form makes her collection Japan’s equivalent of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, historically and poetically.

is a Japanese philosopher whose research focuses on theories of Time and the Self. Born and raised in Fukuoka, he graduated from The University of Tokyo and received his PhD degree from The University of Vienna. Alongside his academic studies, he has published many philosophical essays known for their "vivacious nihilism," such as 'Philosophizing Death,' 'The Ideational Life,' 'On Loneliness' and 'Unhappiness.' Formerly a professor at The University of Electro-Communications, he now presides over a private philosophy school (named after Immanuel Kant) in Tokyo open to students from all walks of life. His homepage can be found here.

is a young poet and playwright living in Gaza, Palestine. He holds a B.A. in Arabic literature from Al-Azhar University, Gaza. His poems have been published locally and internationally, in print and online. His four poetry collections are The Memory Is I and the Memory Is Forgotten (2001), Innocence of the Darkness (2004), You Might (2007), Her Tears Lament the Devastation (2011). He is a co-author of Outside the River's Path (2003). Since 2006, he has worked as a project coordinator of theatre and youth groups for the Cultural Free Thought Association in Gaza City, Occupied Palestine Territories. He is a founding member of the Gaza Poets Forum and the El-Bayader Cultural Forum. He teaches drama, literature, and writing. He has written, directed, and acted in several plays, and has given reading tours in the Middle East and Spain. His poems have been translated into English, French, Spanish, and Dutch.

was a Tang dynasty poet who lived approximately between 844 and 868 in the Chinese capital of Chang'an. She was, by turns, a courtesan, a concubine, and a Daoist nun, and was supposedly executed in her early twenties for having murdered her own maid in a fit of jealous rage. All her extant poems were probably written during the final ten years of her short and intense life.

was born in 1963 in the small city of Quillabamba ("Plain of the Moon" in Quechua) in the Cusco region of Peru. In 1984 he moved to Europe, residing mainly in Spain where he worked as a street vendor until 1997. Back in Peru, he participated actively in the popular movement that brought about the end of the Fujimori regime (2000). Since then he has directed several magazine and radio programs, events, and cultural groups in the cities of Cusco and Lima, and has participated as a founding member in the Writer's Guild of Peru.

is an internationally known film critic, theoretician and scenarist. Her books on the aesthetics of motion picture, Turbulance and Flow in Film (2008), To Dress a Nude (1998), Profane Mythology (1992), etc., have been widely translated. In Hungary she was the founder and editor-in-chief of Filmkultúra (1965-1973), the journal of the democratic opposition. She is Professor Emeritus at New York University's Graduate Film School, and has also taught at Berkeley, Stanford, the Sorbonne and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Futó ("Runner"), published in Budapest in April of this year, is her first novel.

is a Bulgarian screenwriter, playwright and novelist. His novel 18% Gray, (18% Сиво, Ciela Publishing) published in Bulgaria is a bestselling title with nine printings. It won the prestigious Bulgarian Novel of the Year 2009 Award given by the Edward Vick Foundation, and was a finalist for the renowned literary biennial Elias Canetti Award. It was published in France by Editions Intervalles in June 2011 and is scheduled for publishing in the US in 2012 by Open Letter Books. He sold the film rights of 18% Gray and wrote the screenplay. His collection of short stories Brief History of the Airplane (Кратка история на самолета, Ciela Publishing) won the 2009 Helikon Award, established by Bulgaria's largest bookstore chain. His story "Metastases" was short-listed by the editors at the American publisher Dalkey Archive Press for inclusion in Best European Fiction. His recent book Recoil (Откат, Ciela Publishing), a collection of plays and dialogues, came out in 2010. His latest project, a children's book called Fairytale (Приказка, Ciela Publishing 2010), is co-authored with Silvia Karabashlieva, and illustrated by storyboard artist Iva Sasheva. His stage plays Sunday Evening and Recoil have won the most prestigious Bulgarian theater awards and have been produced at major theater venues. His stage play Lissabon was presented as a staged reading at the Martin E. Segal Center in New York in November 2011, followed by a discussion about his work, issues of translation, and the challenges faced by Bulgarian theatre today. His work has been translated in French, English, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Serbian, Hungarian. He resides in San Diego, California.