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: APLorenza 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 fict...
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...
Photo by hjhipster/FlickrI 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...
WLT: Translating humor across cultures is particularly challenging. What has surprised you most about how your translators have re-created your work in other languages?...
Daniel Simon The themes of “Turning Thirty” have an archetypal feel to them—sickness, death, rebirth, forbidden love, truth, happiness, naming, freedom, madness, fear, solitude. Do y...
Zvonko Karanović
Like the poets of the Beat generation from whom he takes inspiration, poet and fiction writer Zvonko Karanović(b. 1959, Niš, Serbia) has traveled widely throughout...
Kim Kyŏnguk (b. 1971, Kwang-ju, South Korea) earned his bachelor’s in English and master’s in Korean literature from Seoul National University. Since hi...
“I make literature, not war. . . . Literature is not Jewish, Arab, or American. It tells stories to everyone.”These are the words of Boualem Sansal, an exceptionally brave and talent...
Carmen Boullosa
tr. Kristina Zdravič Reardon
Q: Is there a quote you like or think is particularly fitting or relevant to very short fiction, whether by a fiction writer or by someone...
Roberto Brodsky (b. 1957) came of age in Santiago de Chile during the revolutionary years of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970–73). Born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants that escaped the...
Photos provided by John Locke
Technology’s unapologetic march toward a slimmer, sleeker, sexier experience—dominated, and prefixed with, an all-powerful i—has turned payphones...
Photo by Jörg Winger
Anna Winger was raised in Kenya, Massachusetts, and Mexico. She is the author of the novel This Must Be the Place (Riverhead, 2008) and the creator of Berlin S...