In February 2016, after the publication of his energetic, imaginative, Cairo-set novel, Using Life, Ahmed Naji became the first writer in Egyptian history to be imprisoned for “offending public morali…
INTERVIEWS
Irina Flige / Courtesy of the authorIn April 2023 Irina Flige—director of the Research and Information Center “Memorial” in St. Petersburg, Russia, and a longtime board member of Memorial Internationa…
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-four novels,…
Rita Chang-Eppig’s debut novel, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, tells the story of a woman who fights to survive and the cost that survival demands. Based on the real life of a Chinese pirate queen n…
As an eminent poet, translator, man of letters, teacher, anthologist, literary ambassador, family man, and clear-eyed witness to America’s zeitgeist and character over the past half century, Robert Pi…
Ebony Iman Dallas, Songs of Freedom (2021), acrylic and Ghanaian textiles on hand-carved birchwood / Portrait of activist and teacher Clara Luper singing with members of the NAACP Youth Coun…
Photo: Petra KleisCelebrated Danish writer Dorthe Nors’s first nonfiction book, A Line in the World, translated by Caroline Waight, is a stunning work that documents a year s…
Siphiwe Ndlovu. Photo by Joanne Olivier If—as Booker Prize–winner Damon Galgut said—2021 was a good year for African writing, 2022 was especially good for Zimbabwean writers. I spoke with novelis…
Danae Sioziou (b. 1987) was raised in Germany and Greece and works as a cultural manager and educator. Her books to date include Useful Children Games and Probable Landscapes, publi…
Shoshana Bellen standing in front of a typical building in DP Camp Föhrenwald, 1948 (Blimeh Hellman) In his ongoing column, which appears in every other issue, Karlos K. Hill highlights the effor…
R. O. KWON’S work as a writer and editor explores our thorniest truths: whom we love, what we believe, and the kind of sex we want to have. I first encountered Kwon when I read her a…
Photo by Lucas Marquardt The following interview with Ada Limón took place shortly after her appointment, in July 2022, as the 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.…
Author of The Famished Road, among other books, Ben Okri has never been a run-of-the-mill writer. He has been hailed as “a literary and social visionary,” and his oeuvre—novels, plays, poetr…
Photo by pixarno – stock.adobe.com I first came across Maša Kolanović’s illustrated novel, Sloboština Barbie (Underground Barbie), written in Croatian and published by VBZ in 2008, as I comp…
Felix Lembersky, Execution: Babyn Yar (1952), oil on canvas, 35 1/4 x 46 3/8 in. / Private collection Yelena Lembersky (b. 1969) grew up in Leningrad at a time when Jews were starting to…
Antonello da Messina, Saint Jerome in His Study (ca. 1475), oil on lime, 45.7 x 36.2cm / Reproduced by permission of the National Gallery, London Henrietta Rose-Innes is a South African author of…
Masiyaleti Mbewe, “Tove the Guardian,” Niko n D7000, 3/4 (First Edition), 2018 Masiyaleti Mbewe is a Zambian queerfuturist writer, photographer, and activist raised in Botswana and currently base…
Photo by Catherine Hélie © Editions Gallimard Noémi Lefebvre is a multitalented writer. She studied music, received a PhD in music education and national identity in France and Germany, and has w…
Cloud Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash & Ingrid Rojas Contreras Photo by Jeremiah Barber Days after a bicycle crash that would erase her memory for two months, Ingrid Rojas Contreras answer…
Photo by Hernan Zenteno I first came across Eric Schierloh’s multifaceted cultural artisanry imprint Barba de Abejas (Bee beard) when I was gifted a copy of Richard Brautigan’s Please Plant…
When South African poet Ilse van Staden’s first poetry collection, Watervlerk, was published in 2003, it was heralded as one of the groundbreaking poetry works of the new millennium that ste…
Argentine writer Ariel Magnus is the author of well over a dozen books in different genres. His novel Chess with My Grandfather is forthcoming from Seagull Books. Three of his microfictio…
Poet and fiction writer Gloria Susana Esquivel has been quickly positioned in the spotlight of recent Latin American literature. The University of Texas Press recently published Animals at t…
Antoine Volodine (b. 1950) does not exist, not exactly. He is one of the authors and the self-titled spokesperson of postexoticism, a movement that comprises 49 authors to date, with a total prod…
Photo © MacArthur Foundation I first collaborated with poet Natalie Diaz in 2017, when she wrote the introductory essay for a catalog I edited for Visualizing Language. This Pacific Standard Time…