Authors
Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
Valeria Mussio
Valeria Mussio directs the publishing house Matrerita, where she experiments with digital literatures. She is the author of Manual de supervivencia para un ataque de ira, ¡Hasta pronto, querida!, and Nuestros refugios a medio armar. Originally from Bahía Blanca, she is also part of the Isla Invisible project.
Shakir Mustafa
Shakir Mustafa is teaching professor of Arabic at Northeastern University. Mustafa grew up in Iraq and taught at Mosul University in Northern Iraq for eleven years. His book Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology (2008) was recognized by the Bloomsbury Review as one of the most important books of 2008. He has given dozens of lectures as well as radio and television interviews on Arab and Muslim cultures and politics.
Sahar Mustafah
Sahar Mustafah is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, an inheritance she explores in her fiction. Her first novel, The Beauty of Your Face, was named a 2020 Notable Book and Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review. She writes and teaches outside of Chicago. (saharmustafah.com)
Álvaro Mutis
Álvaro Mutis (b. 1923) is a Colombian poet, novelist, and essayist. Though he was born in Colombia, he lived in Brussels until he was eleven years old. His first collection of poetry was published in 1948 and his first short stories appeared in 1978. Mutis is best known for his award-winning novellas published in the United States in two collections, Maqroll andThe Adventures of Maqroll.
Gathondu Mwangi
Gathondu Mwangi is a geography PhD student and writer who spends his time between Massachusetts and Kenya, his home country. He enjoys listening to Congolese rumba, the inspiration for this poem. His work has previously appeared in The Fourth River, Kalahari Review, and Kwani?.
Nader Naderpour
Nader Naderpour (1929–2000) published his first collection of poetry in the 1940s. In the 1960s he directed the literature department of the Iranian National Radio and Television. He left Iran in 1980. Regarded as one of the leaders of the movement of “New Poetry” in Iran, he published nine collections of poems. Naderpour was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett Grant in 1993.
Photo by Yossi Zamirdiv>Mei-Tal Nadler
Mei-Tal Nadler received the 2014 Teva Prize in Poetry and the 2008 Ministry of Culture award for emerging poets. Her debut collection, Nisuyim be-chashmal (Experiments in electricity), was published last year. She is a doctoral candidate in Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University and a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute.
André Naffis-Sahely
André Naffis-Sahely’s (andrenaffis.com) first collection of poetry is The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017). His translations from French and Italian include works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Alessandro Spina, Rashid Boudjedra, and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Beyond the Barbed Wire (Carcanet, 2016), his translation of the selected poems of Abdellatif Laâbi, received a Writers in Translation award from English PEN. His essay on Tangiers, “You’ll Never Leave: Seeking Salvation on the Shores of Morocco,” appears in the Winter 2019 issue of WLT.
Shahla Naghiyeva
Shahla Naghiyeva is an associate professor of translation and literature in the department of foreign literature of the Azerbaijan University of Languages.
Hera Naguib
Hera Naguib is a poet and teacher based in Lahore, Pakistan. She is a graduate of the MFA in Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Spillway, diode, and elsewhere.
Lea Nagy
Lea Nagy is the recipient of an NKA grant (National Cultural Fund of Hungary). She has published two poetry collections, Kõhullás / Whirlwind and Légörvény / Stone Fall, with Editions Napkút in Budapest. She won the prize for Best Young Hungarian Poet in 2018. A French collection, Le chaos en spectacle, just came out from Éditions du Cygne in Paris.
Kawan Nahaee
Kawan Nahaee is a Kurdish poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Born in 1982 in Bane, eastern Kurdistan, he earned his master’s degree in art and architecture at Sine University. His novel ‘پێشەوا قاقا پێدەکەنێ’ (Pêşewa bursts out laughing), written in Kurdish, came out in 2018. He has published two collections of poetry written in Kurdish: وتم باران، نووسیت چەتر (I said rain, you wrote umbrella) and بۆب ئێسپەنجی لە ڕۆژهەڵاتی ناوەڕاست (SpongeBob in the Middle East). His forthcoming collection جەنگ (War) will appear in both languages. He won first prize for Kurdish-language poetry at the Pîranşar Festival of Modern Poetry in 2016 and first prize for a short story at the Bane International Story Festival in 2015.
Samina Najmi
A scholar of race, gender, and war in multiethnic American literature, Samina Najmi discovered the rewards of more personal kinds of writing in 2011. Her essay “Abdul” won Map Literary’s 2012 nonfiction prize. Samina grew up in Karachi and London and now calls California’s San Joaquin Valley home.
Photo by Beowulf Sheehandiv>Ruby Namdar
Ruby Namdar is an Israeli American author born and raised in Jerusalem to a family of Iranian-Jewish heritage. His first book, Haviv (2000), won the Ministry of Culture’s Award for Best First Publication. His novel The Ruined House (2013, Eng. 2017) won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. He currently lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters and teaches Jewish literature, focusing on biblical and Talmudic narrative.
Vi Khi Nao
Vi Khi Nao's work includes poetry, fiction, film, and cross-genre collaboration. She is the author of Sheep Machine (2018); Umbilical Hospital (2017); the short-story collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016; the novel Fish in Exile (2016); and the verse collection The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014.
Susan Smith Nash
Susan Smith Nash’s PhD dissertation from the University of Oklahoma examined apocalyptic narratives in literary, film, and cultural texts. She has combined her passion for geology and energy technologies to develop programs that promote innovation and new solutions. Her latest projects involve a deep dive into Mexican cinema and the influence of the golden age of Mexican cinema.
Nawal Nasrallah
Nawal Nasrallah is an independent scholar specializing in the history and culture of Arab food. Her published works include Delights from the Garden of Eden (2013) and English translations of medieval Arabic cookbooks by Brill: Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens, by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq; Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table; and Best of Delectable Foods and Dishes from al-Andalus and al-Maghrib.
Ibrahim Nasrallah
Writer, artist, and photographer Ibrahim Nasrallah was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were uprooted from their land in 1948. The author of fourteen poetry collections and twenty-two novels, his epic series of novels, The Palestinian Comedy, covers 250 years of modern Palestinian history. His novel Prairies of Fever was listed by the Guardian as one of the ten most important novels written about the Arab world. Among many other prizes for his work, in 2012 he won the inaugural Jerusalem Award for Culture and Creativity for his literary work.
Photo by Hind Saroutdiv>Amjad Nasser
Amjad Nasser (b. 1955, Jordan) is one of the leading figures of his generation writing in Arabic today. He has published nine poetry collections, four lyric travel memoirs, and one novel, Land of No Rain (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Books). He is the cultural editor of the Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi and lives in London. Shepherd of Solitude (2009) is the first selected translation of his poetry in English, and his works have been translated into several languages.
Mohamad Nassereddine
Mohamad Nassereddine was born in 1977 in South Lebanon. He is the author of seven poetry collections, the most recent of which is Cages in Search of Birds (Dar al-Nahda al-Arabiyya, 2019). He holds a PhD in medical engineering and teaches at the Lebanese University. He is also a translator and cultural journalist who regularly publishes interviews, translations, and reviews in the cultural appendix of the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.
Zira Naurzbayeva
Zira Naurzbayeva holds a doctorate from Al-Farabi Kazakhstan State University. She is the author of several books on Kazakh mythology as well as co-author of a series of children’s adventure stories featuring legends and heroes from Kazakh myth. English translations of her work have been published in Words Without Borders and in Best Asian Short Stories 2019.
Michael M. Naydan
Michael M. Naydan is the Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He has received numerous prizes for his translations, including the George S. N. Luckyj Award in Ukrainian Literature Translation from the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies in 2013. He has been writing about Ukrainian literature—and translating it—for WLT since 2005. His “Literary and Historical Sources for Understanding Ukraine” recommended reading list appeared in the July 2022 issue. Naydan and Alla Perminova’s translation of Zelensky: A Biography, by Serhii Rudenko, was published by Polity Books in 2022.
Liliana M. Naydan
Liliana M. Naydan is an associate professor of English and Chair of the English Program at Penn State Abington.
Rabiqe Nazim qizi
Rabiqe Nazim qizi was born in 1979 in Baku. She has worked for several newspapers as a reporter and translator. She has published two books of poetry (Up to You and Episodes of Love) and was awarded the Nasimi Prize for Literature and the “Umid Ishighi” (Hope’s Light) Prize in International Literature from the Rasul Rza Foundation.
