Authors

Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.

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  • Kwame Anthony Appiah

    Kwame Anthony Appiah (b. 1954, London) is a philosopher, novelist, cultural theorist, and scholar of African and African American studies who teaches in New York University’s Department of Philosophy and School of Law. Among his many awards and honors, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017.



  • Zaina Arafat

    Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian American writer based in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, You Exist Too Much, won a Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay’s favorite book of 2020. Her essays and articles have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, VICE, BuzzFeed, Granta, Guernica, The Believer, Harper’s Bazaar, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She holds an MA in international affairs from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Iowa.



  • Photo by Kanaka Menehunediv>

    Homero Aridjis

    Homero Aridjis (born April 6, 1940) is a Mexican poet, novelist, environmental activist, journalist and diplomat known for his originality and independence.



  • Photo by Harold Abramowitzdiv>

    Rae Armantrout

    Rae Armantrout (b. 1947) is an American poet born in California. She has published ten books of poetry and also has been featured in anthologies. She is a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of California, San Diego.


  • Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac

    Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac is the author of Beyond Elsewhere (Éditions du Cygne). His publications include Petite anthologie de la jeune poésie française (Éditions Géhess), Le livre de la prière (Éditions de l’Inférieur), Les Citadelles, Poésie Directe, Littérales, Polyglotte, Recours au Poème, Testament, 3è Millénaire and L’Opinion indépendante. He contributed to the book Irak, la faute, with Alain Michel and Fabien Voyer (Éditions du Cerf). He graduated from Sciences Po and holds a master’s degree (Fondements des Droits de l'Homme). He also studied philosophy and Eastern poetry. 



  • Chris Arthur

    Chris Arthur’s most recent essay collection is Hidden Cargoes (2022). He lives in St Andrews, Scotland. Details of his books can be found at www.chrisarthur.org.



  • Photo by Shevaun Williamsdiv>

    Meshack Asare

    Meshack Asare is a gifted Ghanaian author-illustrator who has won international acclaim for a rare combination of literary and artistic talent as revealed in his storybooks. He is the winner of the 2015 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature.



  • Lane Ashfeldt

    Lane Ashfeldt is the author of SaltWater (2014), a book of short fiction inspired by the sea. Her story “SaltWater” appeared in London Magazine.



  • Photo courtesy of authordiv>

    Yiftach Ashkenazi

    Yiftach Ashkenazi is the author of three novels and two collections of short stories. He has also published poems, short stories, and literary reviews in local magazines as well as stories and reviews published in English and German. In 2016 he won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Literary Works and the Rotenstreich Scholarship for Outstanding Doctoral Student in the Humanities. At the moment, he is completing his PhD and writing a thriller TV series for an Israeli cable network.



  • Photo by Shevaun Williamsdiv>

    Rilla Askew

    Rilla Askew is the author of five novels, a book of stories, and a collection of creative nonfiction, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place. She received a 2009 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and teaches at the University of Oklahoma. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Massacre, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award in 2002. Her most recent novel, Prize for the Fire, appeared in October 2022.


  • Nadeem Aslam

    Nadeem Aslam (b. 1966) is a prize-winning British Pakistani novelist.



  • Tacey M. Atsitty

    Tacey M. Atsitty, Diné, is Tsénahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta’neeszahnii (Tangle People) from Cove, Arizona. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University. Her work has appeared in many publications. Her first book is Rain Scald (UNM Press, 2018).



  • Paul Auster

    Paul Auster (b. 1947) is an American author and director. He is a novelist and poet, and writes absurdist fiction, crime fiction, and mystery fiction. He won the IMPAC Award in 2010, 2011, and 2012.


  • Najib George Awad

    Najib Awad is a prolific Syrian poet who has published four collections of poetry. His works have appeared in literary magazines throughout the Arab world. A professor of Christian theology, he has also published works on Arab Christians and the Arab Spring.



  • Mark Axelrod-Sokolov

    Mark Axelrod-Sokolov is a professor of comparative literature in the Department of English at Chapman University, Orange, California, and has been director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing for twenty-five years. His latest fiction books include Balzac’s Coffee, DaVinci’s Ristorante, and the translation of Balzac’s play, Mercadet, which was retitled Waiting for Godeau, and Beckett’s Bar, Pushkin’s Vodka. His latest books of literary criticism include Madness in Fiction: Literary Essays from Poe to Fowles and Notions of Otherness: Literary Essays from Cahan to Maraini. His screenplay MALARKEY, based on his novel The Mad Diary of Malcolm Malarkey, PhD, has garnered the interest of Malcolm McDowell and is currently being shopped. He was inducted into the European Academy of Arts and Sciences, Salzburg, in 2017.



  • Esmahan Aykol

    Esmahan Aykol (b. 1970) is a Turkish writer. She has written three novels, which have been published in Turkish, German, French, and Italian.



  • Shokoofeh Azar

    Shokoofeh Azar is the author of essays, articles, and children’s books and is the first Iranian woman to hitchhike the entire length of the Silk Road. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, originally written in Farsi and translated by an anonymous translator, was shortlisted for Australia’s 2018 Stella Prize for Fiction and the 2020 International Booker Prize. It is her first novel to be translated into English.



  • Ibtisam Azem

    Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian short-story writer, novelist, and journalist. Her second novel, The Book of Disappearance (Sifr al-Ikhtifa), was translated into English by Sinan Antoon and published by Syracuse University Press in 2019. She lives in New York City.



  • Basma Abdel Aziz

    Basma Abdel Aziz is an award-winning writer, sculptor, and psychiatrist. A long-standing vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, she is the author of several works of nonfiction. In 2016 she was named one of Foreign Policy’s Leading Global Thinkers for her debut novel, The Queue. She lives in Cairo.


  • Natalka Babina

    Natalka Babina (b. 1966) is a Belarusian journalist and writer.


  • Pier Luigi Bacchini

    Pier Luigi Bacchini (b. 1927) is from Parma (Emilia), where he lived until 1993, retiring to the countryside near Medesano not far from the city. His poetry collections include Dal silenzio d'un nulla (1954), Canti familiari (1968), Distanze, fioriture (1981), Visi e foglie (1993), Scritture vegetali (1999), Contemplazioni meccaniche e pneumatiche (2005), and Canti territoriali (2009). "Chiacchiere," the poem translated here, is from Scritture vegetali.



  • Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffithsdiv>

    Beth Bachmann

    Beth Bachmann is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry and the author of two books from the Pitt Poetry Series: Temper, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Do Not Rise, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. Each fall, she serves as Writer in Residence in the MFA program at Vanderbilt University.



  • Photo by Stéphane Chaumetdiv>

    Rachel Tzvia Back

    Poet and translator Rachel Tzvia Back lives in the Galilee, where her great-great-great-grandfather settled in the 1830s. Her poetry collections include A Messenger Comes (elegies), On Ruins & Return, Azimuth, and the forthcoming collection entitled What Use Is Poetry, the Poet Is Asking. Her most recent translation project, On the Surface of Silence: The Last Poems of Lea Goldberg, will be published in spring 2017.



  • Shakeel Badayuni

    Shakeel Badayuni (1916–70) was a successful and prolific Bollywood songwriter as well as a renowned author of Urdu ghazals. Born in Uttar Pradesh, India, his father taught him Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and Hindi. He attended Aligarh University in the 1930s, then a center of political and poetical ferment. He quickly became a leading figure in Bollywood with the success of the first film he wrote lyrics for, Dard. Shakeel wrote lyrics for eighty-nine films.



  • Gabeba Baderoon

    Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet. She is the author of the poetry collections The Dream in the Next Body (2005), The Museum of Ordinary Life (2005), and A hundred silences (2006). The Dream in the Next Body was named a Notable Book of 2005 by the Sunday Independent and was a Sunday Times Recommended Book. A hundred silences was a finalist for the 2007 University of Johannesburg Prize for Creative Writing and the 2007 Olive Schreiner Award. In 2005 Baderoon received the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry and held the Guest Writer Fellowship at the Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden. She is the recipient of a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in Italy and a TrustAfrica Visiting Writer’s Residency at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa for 2008.



  • Photo © Kael Alforddiv>

    Anna Badkhen

    Anna Badkhen has spent most of her life in the Global South. Her immersive investigations of the world’s iniquities have yielded six books of nonfiction, most recently Fisherman’s Blues (2018). She has written about wars on three continents and is a 2017–2018 writer-in-residency at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, where she is at work on her first novel. In 2018 she was awarded the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship.



  • Alexander Badkhen

    Alexander Badkhen was born in 1952 in Leningrad, USSR. He is a Russian psychotherapist and the author of In the Presence of Another: A Lyrical Exploration of Psychotherapy, published in 2019.



  • Photo by Ahmad Daridiv>

    Liana Badr

    Palestinian novelist, short-story writer, and film director Liana Badr was born in Jerusalem and is one of the most celebrated and translated Palestinian writers. She was exiled from Jericho in 1967 and has lived in many countries. She has directed seven documentary films, which have received many international awards.



  • Mirza Athar Baig

    Mirza Athar Baig is a Pakistani novelist, playwright, and short-story writer. His works include the novel Ghulam Bagh (The garden of slaves), considered one of the most important novels of Urdu literature. He lives in Lahore and teaches philosophy at Government College University.


  • Julene Bair

    Julene Bair is an American author.