Jonas Hassen Khemiri 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.
Rachel Willson-Broyles is a freelance translator specializing in translating contemporary literature from Swedish to English. She received her BA in Scandinavian Studies from Gustavus Adolphus College in 2002 and her Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. Her translations include Jonas Hassen Khemiri's novel Montecore and play INVASION! She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Neneng Nurjanah is an author and one of the editors for Eko Endarmoko's Tesaurus Bahasa Indonesia. Her articles and short stories have appeared in Tribun Jabar, Pikiran Rakyat, Harian Republika, and Jurnal Titik Temu. Her poems and short stories have also been included in anthologies: Si Murai dan Orang Gila (Jakarta Arts Council's Short Story Anthology), Tuah Tara No Ate (4th Indonesian Authors Summit's Short Story and Poetry Anthology), and Cinta Gugat (Reboan Literary Community's 2nd Poetry Anthology).
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).
Emily Yaewon Lee is a freelance translator born in Toronto, Canada, and schooled in the UK and in South Korea. Her translations of the novels of Ali Smith, Sebastian Faulks, and Iain Banks have been published by the Korean press Open Books. She is currently working on Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, both of which are due to be released in Korea in 2014.
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.
Nina Beguš is Asymptote's editor-at-large for Slovenia and a PhD student in comparative literature at Harvard University. Her interests include world literature and ancient Mediterranean and Silk Road literatures, as well as Central European modernism. She also translates from English and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and works as a cultural journalist for several Slovenian literary journals (Literatura, Primerjalna književnost, AirBeletrina, Mentor).
