Authors
Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
Juhani Karila
Juhani Karila is the author of two collections of short stories. His debut novel, Fishing for the Little Pike (2019), won the Kalevi Jäntti Prize, the Tähtifantasia Prize, and the Jarkko Laine Prize. He lives in Helsinki, Finland.
Persis Karim
Persis Karim is a poet, editor, and professor of comparative and world literature at San Francisco State University, where she also serves as director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. She has been involved with the Al-Mutanabbi Starts Here project since 2007, contributing to the anthology, broadside, and, more recently, to “Shadow and Light” projects. She is the editor of three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature; her own poetry has appeared in numerous publications including Callaloo, Reed Magazine, Raven’s Perch, New York Times, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, and others.
Fowzia Karimi
Fowzia Karimi is a writer and an illustrator. Her illuminated debut novel, Above Us the Milky Way, was released in 2020. She has illustrated Faust, by Johann Wolfgang van Goethe (translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner); The Brick House, by Micheline Aharonian Marcom; and Vagrants and Uncommon Visitors, by A. Kendra Greene. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.
Nilufar Karimi
Nilufar Karimi is an Iranian American poet and translator. Her works have appeared in West Wind Review and Alchemy Journal of Translation and on behalf of the San Diego Asian Film Festival of the Pacific Arts Movement.
Ghada Karmi
Ghada Karmi is a doctor of medicine, an academic until recently at the University of Exeter, and a political analyst and commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She has written several books, including two memoirs, In Search of Fatima and Return.
Photo: Gal Hermonidiv>Alit Karp
Alit Karp is a literary critic for Israel’s daily newspaper, Haaretz. She frequently authors opinion columns on issues related to minority rights and freedom of speech in Israel. Her story “The Princess” appeared in Asymptote in 2016 and was selected by the Guardian (UK) for its Translation Tuesday feature. Her story “Made Flesh” was published in 2017 by World Literature Today. Her book Geese: Travel Impressions from Sweden was published in 2018 by Afik – A Channel for Israeli Literature.
Bill Kartalopoulos
Bill Kartalopoulos is series editor for the Best American Comics series. He also teaches comics history and the graphic novel at Parsons The New School for Design and the School of Visual Arts. He is currently working on a general history of American comics for Princeton University Press.
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is a novelist and a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her creative work follows the treacherous path of politics by intruding into people’s personal lives and private spaces. Through her poems and stories, she explores some of the themes of her academic research, including alienation, prejudice, power, love, and violence.
Kapka Kassabova
Kapka Kassabova is a poet and writer. Border (2017) and To the Lake (2020) explore the human geography of the southern Balkans. Border won the British Academy’s Al-Rodhan Prize, the Saltire Book of the Year, the Stanford-Dolman Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Prix européen du livre, and the Angelus Award.
Slađana Kavarić
Slađana Kavarić is a Montenegrin author. She writes poetry and short stories. To date, she has published two books of poetry: Memory (Sjećanje, 2010) and People from Nowhere (Ljudi niotkuda, 2016). She was born in Podgorica in 1991.
Mieko Kawakami
Mieko Kawakami (b. 1976) is the author of Breasts and Eggs (original title: Natsu monogatari), which was selected for the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books in 2020 and Time’s 10 Best Books in 2020. Her other novels, Heaven and All the Lovers in the Night, are also forthcoming in English. She has received numerous prestigious literary awards in Japan, including the Akutagawa Prize, Tanizaki Prize, and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize. She lives in Tokyo.
Hiromi Kawakami
Hiromi Kawakami (b. 1958, Tokyo) is one of the most popular and respected writers of fiction in Japan, and she is also known as a literary critic and a provocative essayist. Her first novel, Kamisama (God), was published in 1994. In 1996 she was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for Hebi wo fumu (Tread on a snake) and subsequently won the It? Sei Literature Prize, the Woman Writer's Prize, the Tanizaki Prize. In 2007 she was honored by the Ministry of Education for her novel Manazuru, which was subsequently published in Michael Emmerich's translation (Counterpoint, 2010), and her novel The Briefcase, translated by Allison Markin Powell, is forthcoming from Counterpoint in February 2012. (Adapted from Wikipedia)
Eleni Kefala
Eleni Kefala has published two books of poetry. She has been a finalist for the Diavazo First-Time Author Award (Greece) and winner of the State Prize for Poetry (Cyprus). She was a juror for the 2022 Neustadt Prize, and she teaches Latin American and comparative literature at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp is a literary translator—working from Arabic, Russian, and German into English—whose work has been shortlisted for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, and the GLLI Translated YA Book Prize. She is co-editor of World Kid Lit blog, and she champions world literature for young people in schools and online, especially during #WorldKidLitMonth.
Cate Kennedy
Cate Kennedy is the award-winning author of novels, poetry, short fiction, and a travel memoir. Her two short-story collections are Dark Roots (2006) and Like a House on Fire (2012), winner of the Queensland Award for best short-story collection and shortlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize. Her story “Cold Snap,” from Dark Roots, was published in the New Yorker as “Black Ice.” The Taste of River Water, Kennedy’s most recent poetry collection, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for poetry in 2012.
Photo: © Dan H. Fullerdiv>Jesse Lee Kercheval
Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of fifteen books of poetry and fiction and a translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Recent books include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia and América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets (reviewed here). She is the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin.
Rita Keresztesi
Rita Keresztesi is a professor in the Department of English as the University of Oklahoma. Her research and teaching focus is on African and African diaspora literary and cultural studies. Dr. Keresztesi was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar at l’Université Ouaga 1 Professeur Ki-Zerbo, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, during the academic year 2010–2011. She has been a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Alumni Ambassador since 2016. She is the author of the book Literary Black Power in the Caribbean: Fiction, Music and Film (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2021); of Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars (University of Nebraska Press, 2005/2009); and the co-editor (with Ellie Higgins and Dayna Oscherwitz) of the book The Western in the Global South (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2015). Her recent publications focus on West African cinema and music and on Afro-Caribbean literature and culture.
Ziad Khadash
Ziad Khadash was born in Jerusalem and lives in Jalazon Refugee Camp. He is the author of twelve books. He works as a teacher of creative writing in Palestine schools. The recipient of the State Prize, he was shortlisted for the Arab Story Forum Award in Kuwait.
Porochista Khakpour
Porochista Khakpour is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Sick (HarperPerennial, 2017), and the novels The Last Illusion (2014) and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007). Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, Spin, Elle, and many others. She is Writer in Residence at Bard College.
Hawre Khalid
Born in Iraq’s contested city of Kirkuk, Hawre Khalid began his photojournalism career during the early years of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. His photographs have appeared in the New York Times, Time, National Geographic, and Washington Post, among many other publications. His photography has been exhibited worldwide, but Through the Smoke, Behind the Curtain (Kashkul, 2019) was his first solo show in Kurdistan.
Taha Khalil
Taha Khalil is a writer, painter, and intellectual from Syria. Today he hosts a regular television program on Ronahi TV in Qamishlo and is one of the Rojava Centre for Strategic Studies’ three directors.
Yousef Khanfar
An award-winning Palestinian author, Yousef Khanfar has published three books, is featured globally in many publications, and is listed as one of the world’s top photographers. He has received appreciation from the White House, US Supreme Court, the UK’s House of Lords, and beyond. The Fulbright Center for Peace in Washington, DC, selected his book to help celebrate the Global Symposium of Peaceful Nations. He was selected as Artist of the Year to promote literacy with UNICEF, and the Palestine mission to the United Nations honored him for “appreciation of his extraordinary service to promoting peace and justice in Palestine through art.”
Photo by Kevin Plattdiv>Semyon Khanin
Semyon Khanin was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1970. He is the author of two collections of poetry in Russian, Tol'ko chto (2003; Just now) and Opushchennye podrobnosti(2008; Missed details). His poetry has been translated into Latvian, English, Czech, German, Italian, Swedish, Estonian, and Ukranian. He is a participant in the literary project Orbita and editor of the almanac by the same name.
Oleksandr Khodakivsky
Oleksandr Khodakivsky is the author of a book of selected poems and essays, Lubvi Molchanie Lobovoe (2019). He lives in Kharkiv.
