Q: Would you like to be called a “woman writer” or just a “writer”?
A: When I was young, I didn’t like the title “woman writer”; but now I’ve accepted it, because th…
Interviews
Alain Mabanckou. Photo by Shevaun Williams. During his visit to the University of Oklahoma in April, Alain Mabanckou sat down with Rokiatou Soumaré—a graduate student in OU’s Department of Modern Lan…
Illustration: Alec Dempster Agustín del Moral Tejeda was born in Las Choapas, Veracruz, in 1956. An accomplished writer, journalist, editor, translator, and activist, he currently lives and works in…
Viet Thanh Nguyen (photo by Bebe Jacobs), Andrew Lam, and Aimee Phan (photo by Julie Thi Underhill), respectively. Viet Thanh Nguyen became the first Vietnamese American writer to win the Pulitzer P…
Tomasz Różycki Photo: Slav Zatoka Tomasz Różycki rose to both critical and popular prominence as an important voice of his generation in Poland when his fifth book, Twelve Stations, won the…
Luis Alberto de Cuenca (b. 1950, Madrid) is perhaps the one Spanish poet today who has influenced most of the younger generations of poets. He recently received the National Poetry Award for his late…
South Korean writer Han Kang photographed by Baik Dahum. Born in South Korea in 1970, Han Kang made her literary debut as a poet in 1993. She has since published novels and short fiction and won the…
Wang Ping. Photo by Sara Rubinstein Wang Ping emigrated to the US from China in 1986 and is currently a professor of English at Macalester College. She is a writer, poet, translator, photographer, an…
Han Kang. Photo by Baik Dahum. What are you currently reading? Victor I. Stoichita’s A Short History of the Shadow What’s u…
Hasan Ali Toptaş. Photo: buyukkeyif.com Hasan Ali Toptaş is one of the most exciting contemporary writers of Turkish literature. His short stories and novels have won prestigious national awards. His…
Nathalie Handal. Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Groundbreaking poet, playwright, and editor Nathalie Handal is one of our most diverse contemporary writers, and as the Washington Independent Re…
Born in 1959, David B. (B. is short for Beauchard) began working in comics and illustration around 1985. In 1990, with a group of six other artists, he co-founded L’Association, the most influential p…
Photo: Mary Evans/Oscar Elias/Iberfoto Pere Gimferrer i Torrens is a poet, novelist, translator, and critic with some fifty books to his name. Despite countless awards and the praise of such writer…
Orllan. Photo by Ragi Pluta. Kosovo is a young and vibrant country striving to prevail in a harsh new Balkan reality. Ragip Luta is the director of Kosovo’s Festival of Literatu…
Photo by Jean-Marie Muggianu (Flickr.com/jmmuggianu) Born in Chania, Crete, in 1938, Iossif Ventura is a prominent Greek-Jewish poet and translator, a member of the Hellenic Authors’ Society, and the…
Valeria Luiselli. Photo by Alfredo Pelcastre. It may have been fate that one of Mexico’s most magnificent recent literary exports led me to another one. Finding Sergio Pitol, whose first English tran…
Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), born in Syria in 1930, is considered the most influential living Arab poet of our times. Due to his opposition to the political regime at the time, he fled to Beirut in…
Lorenza Rozano. Photo: AP Lorenza Ronzano lives in Alessandria, Italy, where she works as an existential therapist for the psychiatric ward of a hospital. Zolfo…
Ronit Matalon/Photo by Shay Ignatz Editorial note: An abbreviated version of the following essay appears in the May 2015 print edition of WLT. Who is Ronit Matalon? An Israeli ficti…
Photo: AP Persis Karim: Can you say a little about what finally made you leave Iran? Were you threatened with imprisonment? I know you left in 2009, but in the inter…
Jonathan Wright. Photo by Tom Pilson The life of this interview began when Hassan Blasim and Jonathan Wright were announced as joint winners of the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The…
The gallery above includes photos of Potosi and Cerro Rico Mine, Bolivia. Photos © Kevin Gass Photojournalist Kevin Gass has been creating photo essays that capture countries and cultures in flux…
Photo by Simon Hurst In 2010 Ethiopian American writer Maaza Mengiste’s literary debut, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze,…
Photo by hjhipster/Flickr I asked myself these questions in a field outside an apartment community in Dallas, Texas. It was cold. The people walking by looked at me strangely ei…- Q: Translating humor across cultures is particularly challenging. What difficulties did you confront while translating these essays and how did you resolve them? A: L…
