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 Literature…
Interviews
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 d…
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 transl…
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 IgnatzEditorial note: An abbreviated version of the following essay appears in the May 2015 print edition of WLT.Who is Ronit Matalon? An Israeli fiction…
Photo: APPersis 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 intervi…
Jonathan Wright. Photo by Tom PilsonThe 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 Ir…
The gallery above includes photos of Potosi and Cerro Rico Mine, Bolivia. Photos © Kevin GassPhotojournalist Kevin Gass has been creating photo essays that capture countries and cultures in f…
Photo by Simon HurstIn 2010 Ethiopian American writer Maaza Mengiste’s literary debut, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze,…
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 eith…- Q: Translating humor across cultures is particularly challenging. What difficulties did you confront while translating these essays and how did you resolve them?A: Li…
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.…
- Zvonko KaranovićLike 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 Eu…
- Kim Kyŏnguk (b. 1971, Kwang-ju, South Korea) earned his bachelor’s in English and master’s in Korean literature from Seoul National University. Sinc…
- “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 Boullosatr. Kristina Zdravič ReardonQ: 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 i…
- 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…
- ({"video_url": "http://vimeo.com/44478910", video_config: { width: 600, height: 338 } }) Marina CarrThe 2012 Puterbaugh Fellow“Lately I have begun to suspect if th…
- Photo of Richard Mason by Michael LionstarRichard Mason’s first novel, The Drowning People, published when he was twenty-one, sold more…
- 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 payphon…
- Photo by Jörg WingerAnna 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 Stor…
- The novels of Julia Franck (b. 1970, East Berlin) draw on German literary tradition to explore the interconnection of private lives and public histories. Die Mittagsfrau (2007; Eng.…
- David SmallIntroduction by Elizabeth R. BaerThe following interview was conducted by Julia Tindell, a student in a course I taught at Gustavus Adolphus College in fall 2010. English 201, “The Art of I…
