Community: Writers, Translators & Artists

Yasmine Seale

Yasmine Seale’s work includes poetry, criticism, translation and visual art. Her essays on literature, art and film have appeared in many places, including Harper’sThe NationParis Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is the author, with Robin Moger, of Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press). Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton), described by the New Yorker as “an electric new translation”, and Something Evergreen called Life, a collection of poems by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun (Action Books). Her honours include the 2020 Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from PEN America, the Wolfson Foundation, Koç University in Istanbul, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. She is currently a fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Massimo Antonaci

Massimo Antonaci was born in 1958 in Grottaglie, Italy. He received his M.F.A. in sculpture from the Brera Academy of Fine Art in Milan in 1981. His more recent exhibitions include 'Dans le Silence le plus total’, which took place in 2010 at the Dar Bach Hamba palace in Tunisia, then travelled to Morocco and Egypt. In 2012, his works were exhibited at Collezioni Maramotti, in Reggio Emilia, Italy. 

Andrea Applebee

Andrea Applebee was raised outside of Charleston, South Carolina. She received her BA in English from Davidson College, and an MFA in nonfiction, as well as a certificate in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Pittsburgh. She taught critical writing at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Duke, where she also instructed in the Center for Documentary Studies. Her teaching interests included documentary poetics, writing about photographs, and intersections between art and philosophy. Andrea moved to Athens, Greece, in 2016 with her guide dog Mercy. She works there as a freelance editor. Her first collection of poems, Aletheia (Black Square Editions) was published in 2017. She has a forthcoming book of poems, Anemones, with Magra Press. 

Polly Barton

Polly Barton is a Japanese translator and writer based in Bristol. Stories she has translated have appeared in Words Without BordersGranta, and The White Review. Full-length translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press), and There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury). Her debut book Fifty Sounds, awarded the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, is published April 2021 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Erica Baum

Erica Baum is a New York based artist, BA Barnard College, MFA Yale School of Art. Recent and upcoming exhibitions in 2015-2016 include Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Reconstructions: Recent Acquisitions in Photography and Video at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her books include Dog Ear, (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) and The Naked Eye, (Crèvecœur/œ Paris & Bureau New York 2015). Recent solo exhibitions include The Paper Nautilus, Bureau New York 2014; and Erica Baum Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany, 2013. Her work was included in the 30th Bienal de São Paulo: The Imminence of Poetics, Brazil 2012, and the Athens Biennial: AGORA 2013. She is a recipient of a 2008 NYFA Fellowship in Photography. Erica created the beautiful images within "Clarice the Visitor", vol. 23 of the Cahier Series.

Linda Bree

Linda Bree is Literature Publisher at Cambridge University Press, with a commissioning remit across monographs, reference and text books, and scholarly editions, and across British, European and world literature. Her publications include the first full-length scholarly study of the eighteenth-century writer Sarah Fielding; her most recent project is a scholarly edition of Jane Austen’s manuscripts, co-edited with Janet Todd, which completes The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen.

Kate Briggs

Kate Briggs was born in Frome, Somerset and studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate at the University of Sussex, graduating with a DPhil in 2005. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Dublin, Trinity College 2005-2008 and Assistant Professor in the Dept. of English and Comparative Literature at at AUP 2011-2017, where she taught literary translation and creative writing. Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes's lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France, How to Live Together (2013) and The Preparation of the Novel (2011), both published by Columbia University Press, and co-translator, with Roberto Nigro, of Michel Foucault's Introduction to Kant's 'Anthropology' (MIT / Semiotext(e), 2007). She is the author of three experiments in literary theory and criticism: Exercise in Pathetic Criticism (2011) and The Nabokov Paper (2013), both published by information as material and On Reading as an Alternation of Fights and Perchings (2013), published by NO Press; The Nabokov Paper was also a group exhibition at Shandy Hall, Coxwold, UK, in November 2013. Other work has appeared in Paragraph, Textual Practice, Amodern, Convolution and The White Review. She is currently a core tutor on the MFA in Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and co-initator, with Sarah Tripp, of How Forms Live (howformslive.org), a research, exhibition and lecture-writing project. This Little Art, a long narrative essay on the practice of literary translation, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017.

Buy This Little Art online at the Fitzcarraldo Website.

Bella Brodzki

Bella Brodzki is Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. She works in critical and cultural theory, gender studies, postcolonial studies, translation studies, autobiography, and modern and contemporary fiction. Selected scholarly publications include essays in PMLA, MLN, Yale French Studies, and in collections such as Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature; Women, Autobiography, and Fiction: A Reader; Critical Cosmos: Latin American Approaches to Fiction; and Feminism and Institutions: A Dialogue on Feminist Theory. She is author of Can These Bones Live?: Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory.

Sylvia Brownrigg

Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of six books of fiction, including the novels Pages for You and The Delivery Room. Her work has been included on the NY Times Notable list and the LA Times Best Books of the Year. Her reviews have appeared in the NY Times, The Guardian, and the TLS, and she has taught at the American University of Paris. Her novel for children, Kepler’s Dream (published under the name Juliet Bell) has been turned into an independent feature film. She lives in Berkeley with her family, and continues to spend time in London. Read Sylvia Brownrigg's wonderful work in no.30 of the Cahier Series.

Sylvia Brownrigg's website

Lu Chao

Lu Chao’s oil paintings draw their formal inspiration from traditional Chinese ink painting. His original technique, in which a bold and adventurous use of black and white mirrors the drama of the story-telling, pays a remarkable tribute to the economy of means embodied by traditional Chinese black ink painting. However, his narrative, concerned with the interaction between human beings and sources of power both as terrestrial authority and as metaphysical entity, fits entirely into the ‘humanistic’ Western tradition.

“We find it difficult to truly understand our own persona, and we find it even more exhausting to comprehend the world around us. The gap between what we do and what we do not know, shapes the beauty and excitements of life.” (Lu Chao)

Lu Chao (b. 1988 in Shenyang, China) currently lives and works between London and Beijing. He completed his Bachelor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts - Oil painting department - in Beijing, China and his Masters at the painting department of the Royal College of Art in London, UK. Lu Chao has had solo shows in ambitious international galleries across Europe and Asia. In 2017 an acclaimed duo exhibition featuring his work was held in Venice during the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale. His work has been acquired by the Louis Vuitton Collection, DSL Collection, Strock Collection, Today Art Museum in Beijing and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow (MOCAK), along with several private collections.

Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn was born in the Bronx in 1937. He attended Columbia College and was a founding editor of the Dutton Review and the executive editor of Fiction. He is the author of more than thirty books including The Isaac Quartet, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, and Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace and Magical Land. Charyn is a Guggenheim Fellow whose novel Darlin' Bill received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1996 he was named an Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture.  His prolific writing career includes 37 published works published in twelve languages.

Eric Chevillard

Eric Chevillard est né en 1964 à La Roche-sur-Yon. Il vit aujourd’hui à Dijon. Il est depuis 1987 l’auteur d’une vingtaine de romans publiés aux éditions de Minuit, parmi lesquels Mourir m’enrhume, L’Œuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster, Oreille rouge, Du hérisson, Le Vaillant petit tailleur, Choir, Dino Egger, Le Désordre Azerty, Juste ciel et Ronce-Rose, le dernier, en 2017. Cinq de ses romans ont été publiés aux Etats-Unis : The Crab Nebula, On the ceiling, Demolishing Nisard (tous les trois traduits par Joran Stump), Palafox (trad. Wyatt Mason) et Prehistoric times (trad. Alyson Waters) Eric Chevillard publie aussi des recueils de textes brefs aux éditions Fata Morgana (dernier titre paru : Détartre et désinfecte, 2017). Il a tenu pendant six ans le feuilleton littéraire du Monde des Livres (2011-2017) et publie assidument trois notes quotidiennes sur son blog, L’Autofictif, (http://autofictif.blogspot.fr/) depuis 2007, reprises chaque année en livre aux éditions L’Arbre vengeur qui publiera l’intégrale des dix années en janvier 2018 sous le titre L’Autofictif ultraconfidentiel. En septembre 2016, il publie aux éditions Notabilia une fantaisie critique intitulée Défense de Prosper Brouillon.

J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee is the author of more than a dozen novels, of three fictionalised volumes of autobiography, of five books of collected essays, and of numerous translations and reviews. He has won the Booker Prize twice, for his novels Life & Times of Michael K. and Disgrace, and won the Nobel prize for literature in 2003.

Peter Cole

Peter Cole is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations. His many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Princeton), The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale), and work by Aharon Shabtai, Taha Muhammad Ali, Yoel Hoffmann, and others. His cahier, On Being Drawn: An Ekphrastic Translation (with Commentary), was composed to drawings by the American artist Terry Winters. Among Cole’s many honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a TLS Translation Prize, the PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven.

Claire Conceison

Claire Conceison is Quanta Professor of Chinese Culture and Professor of Theater Studies at MIT. She teaches Chinese theater, Asian American theater, cross-cultural performance, translation, and sport as performance. She holds a master’s degree in Regional Studies—East Asia from Harvard University and PhD in Theatre Studies from Cornell University. Her book Significant Other: Staging the American in China (2004) examines representations of Americans on the Chinese stage from 1987-2002. Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage During China's Revolution and Reform (2009; Chinese version 水流云在:英若诚自传) is the autobiography of the late Chinese actor and cultural diplomat Ying Ruocheng. Her translations include Gao Xingjian’s French plays into English and translations of contemporary Chinese plays into English, including the anthology I Love XXX and Other Plays by Meng Jinghui (Seagull Books, 2016). As a director, she has staged productions of her translations of contemporary Chinese plays at several American universities. She is the translator of Gao Xingjian’s Ballade Nocturne for no. 13 in the Cahiers Series.

Vincen Cornu

Vincen Cornu, architect, was born in 1954 in Poitou. He has completed projects of various scales and types including schools, museums, houses, collective housing, urban projects, and furniture. He is the designer of more than forty museum exhibitions, including for shows by Cézanne, Corot, Delacroix, Matisse, Monet, Munch, Picasso, Poussin, Seurat, Turner, Whistler, and on the Vikings. Since 1994 he has taught at the Ecole d’Architecture de Paris (la Villette). He lives and runs his own architecture practice in Paris.

Related links:

"In the Thick of Things" (The Cahier Series, vol.11. Sylph Editions, December 2009)

Andrew Davidson

Andrew Davidson was born in Pinawa, Manitoba. He graduated with a B.A. in English Literature from the University of British Columbia in 1995, and spent five years in Japan teaching English. His first novel, The Gargoyle, was published in 2008. It was a New York Times bestseller, and has been translated into thirty languages. Following this, Andrew attended the American University of Paris, where he established a creative writing club, and graduated in 2015 with another B.A., this time in Comparative Literature. He currently lives in Winnipeg, playing recreational ice hockey and writing all the time.

Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis was born in 1947 and grew up in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York City. She is the author of one novel and four collections of short fiction, the most recent of which, Varieties of Disturbance (2007), was nominated for a National Book Award. She has translated a number of French novels, memoirs, and volumes of literary criticism, including works by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, Michel Butor, Michel Leiris, and most recently Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (2002), which received the French-American Foundation's Annual Translation Prize. Davis was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and translation, and in 2003 received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. Currently translating Madame Bovary for Penguin Classics, she lives in upstate New York, where she is on the faculty of SUNY Albany and is a Fellow of the New York State Writers Institute.

Related links:

"Proust, Blanchot and a Woman in Red" (The Cahier Series, vol.5. Sylph Editions, November 2007)

Photo by Jim Rakete

Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, UK. She studied at Falmouth School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art before moving to live and work in Berlin in 2000.
Her solo exhibitions include Tate Britain, London (2001), Schaulager, Basel (2006), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Milan (2009) and MUMOK, Vienna (2011), New Museum, New York (2012), Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro (2013), Fondación Botín, Santander (2013) and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2016). Dean was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998, and was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006 and the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009. In 2011, she made FILM as part of the Unilever Series of commissions in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which marked the beginning of her campaign to protect the medium of photochemical film (www.savefilm.org). Other recent group exhibitions include dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), Venice Biennale (2013), Berlin Biennale and Biennale of Sydney (2014). In 2014/15 she was artist in residence at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. See Tacita Dean's stunning illustrations in no.30 of the Cahier Series.

Amanda Dennis

Amanda Dennis is the author of the novel, Her Here, and a forthcoming work of philosophy and literary criticism: Beckett and Embodiment: Body, Space, Agency (July 2021). She studied modern languages at Princeton and Cambridge Universities before earning her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded a Whited Fellowship in creative writing. An avid traveler, she has lived in six countries, including Thailand, where she spent a year as a Princeton in Asia fellow. She has written about literature for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, and she is assistant professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the American University of Paris.

Isabella Ducrot

Isabella Ducrot is a Neapolitan artist who lives and works in Rome, frequently using woven cloth as the basic material or ground of her paintings. Her travels in Asia and her studies of the structure of textile have produced a major collection of antique Asian textiles. In 1993 she showed her work at the Venice Biennale; her textile hanging Rimpianto dei Budda di Bamyan is in the permanent collection at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome; and her painting is on show at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea in Rome. She has complete a series of paintings entitled "Complaint at the Destruction of the Buddhas of Bamian". Two of her monumental mosaics stand in the new Metropolitana in Naples, at the Vanvitelli Station. In January 2008 her new show, entitled Variazioni, opens at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome.

Related links:

"Text on Textile" (The Cahier Series, vol.6. Sylph Editions, February 2008)

Maureen Freely

Maureen Freely is an author, journalist, translator and academic. She is Head of the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and also chairs its writing programme. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and former chair of the Translators Association, she is currently President of English PEN. Best known for her translations of five books by the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, she has also translated or co-translated a dozen other contemporary works and twentieth century classics.  She was recently awarded the Modern Languages Association Lois Roth Award for Literary Translation with Alexander Dawe, for their translation of The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar..  Her own seventh novel, Sailing through Byzantium, was named as one of the best novels of 2013 in the (London) Sunday Times. In Cahier 24 of the Cahier Series, Maureen Freely explores what it was in her childhood that led her to become a traveler across the spaces that exist between countries, languages, and forms. 

Alison Leslie Gold

Alison Leslie Gold's Holocaust and World War II-related works include Anne Frank Remembered, written with Miep Gies, Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend, A Special Fate, and Fiet's Vase and Other Stories of Survival (the last of which she has said is her farewell to this subject matter). Elie Wiesel wrote of Alison Gold and Anne Frank Remembered: “Without her and her talent of persuasion, without her writer's talent, too, this poignant account, vibrating with humanity, would not have been written”. Her nonfiction work has received tributes ranging from a Best of the Best Award (granted by the American Library Association) to a Notable Book for a Global Society Award to a Christopher Award. She has also published fiction, including Clairvoyant and The Devil's Mistress, the latter being nominated for the National Book Award. She divides her time between Manhattan, Hydra (Greece), and British Columbia.

Related links:

"Lost and Found" (The Cahier Series, vol.12. Sylph Editions, February 2010)
Alison Gold's website

Georgi Gospodinov

The debut novel of Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, Natural Novel, was translated into twenty-three languages. His second novel, The Physics of Sorrow, was a finalist for four international prizes, and has been translated into eight languages to date. According to Le Monde, Gospodinov ‘has pulled Bulgarian fiction out of its Communist sleep’. His latest books are a selection of essays, The Invisible Crises, and And All Turned Moon, a collection of short stories. He has also written an opera libretto, a graphic novel, and several movie scripts, and won national awards for his two plays and four books of poetry. In Cahier 29 of the Cahier Series, Gospodinov explores how smugglers, writers and translators are all involved in transporting what is desired, valued, missing, repressed or forbidden. 

Jeffrey Greene

Jeffrey Greene is the author of five collections of poetry; a book of cross-genre writing; a memoir; and three personalized nature books. His writing has been supported through fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Rinehart Fund, and Humanities Texas, and he was a winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize, the Randall Jarrell Award, and the "Discovery"/ The Nation Award. His poems, short stories, and essays have appeared numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, Ploughshares, Agni, Southwest Review and the anthology Strangers in Paris. He is the director of creative writing at the American University of Paris.

Related links:

"Shades of the Other Shore" (The Cahier Series, vol.20. Sylph Editions, April 2013)

Paul Griffiths

Paul Griffiths, born in Wales in 1947, worked for thirty years as a regular music critic in London and New York. Besides the resulting several thousand reviews, he has written books on music, novels, and texts for music, the latter including librettos for Elliott Carter and W. A. Mozart. He also has the unique distinction of having written words for two works that won their composers a Grawemeyer Award: Tan Dun’s Marco Polo (1998) and Hans Abrahamsen’s let me tell you (2016).

In Cahier 22 of the Cahier Series, Paul Griffiths effects a multi-layered translation, taking a series of eleven Japanese Noh plays and turning them into stories in English.

Kirsty Gunn

Kirsty Gunn was born in New Zealand and lives in London and in Scotland. Her first work of fiction, Rain, published in 1994, was translated into over fourteen languages, and was turned into film, radio broadcast, and dance theatre. Since then, she written seven works of fiction including short stories and a work of fragments, 44 things, and an essay, My Katherine Mansfield Project. Her longer fiction includes The Boy and The Sea, and The Big Music which won New Zealand Book of the Year in 2014. She created and directs the Writing Practice and Study Programme at the University of Dundee.

Kirsty contributed to No. 26 in the Cahier Series.

Merran Gunn

Merran Gunn was born in 1964, in New Zealand. Between 1984 and 1992 she studied painting and ceramics at the Cheltenham School of Art and at Reading University in the United Kingdom. Currently, she lives and works in the Far North of Scotland. About her work, which includes sculpture, print and installation art, Merran says the following: “ I have always been interested to explore the painted word and how music relates to colour and spoken sound. Many of my paintings (like the clothes line paintings) are made to be left outdoors, answering my interest in notions of decay and the fleeting passage of time, impermanence and eternity. Conversely, the installations engage with themes of scale and narrative, and the illustrations of Perrault’s fairy tales have been inspirational in the construction of creating alternative realities.”

Merran’s interest in text and image has led to collaborative work with her sister Kirsty Gunn, and University of Dundee Press. Her recent exhibitions include Lullaby, an onboard installation at Scott of Antarctic’s HMS Discovery Ship docked in Dundee, and River Bowl Series, a ceramic exhibition at Dunbeath, Caithness, the birthplace of the renowned Scottish writer Neil Gunn. 

Merran contributed to number 26 in the Cahier Series.

Rosalind Harvey

Rosalind Harvey’s translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’ debut novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. Her co-translation of Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas was shortlisted for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and longlisted for the 2014 IMPAC Award, and she has also worked on books by Elvira Navarro and Héctor Abad Faciolince. She is a past committee member of the UK Translators Association, and founding member and chair of the Emerging Translators Network. She is currently working on a novel by the Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel, forthcoming with MacLehose Press.

Cynthia Haven

Cynthia Haven is a literary and cultural journalist who has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, The Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, and other publications. Her An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz was published in 2011 by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations in 2006, and Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005.  She was a 2008 Milena Jesenská Fellow in Kraków with Vienna's Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen.  She is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University, working on a biography of René Girard.  She blogs at The Book Haven.

Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954. For 14 years he was on the staff of the TLS. He is the author of five novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty (which won the Man Booker Prize in 2004, and was adapted for BBC2 by Andrew Davies), and The Stranger's Child. He lives in London.

Rie Iwatake

Rie Iwatake was born in South Africa and grew up in Japan, studying at the department of craft of Kanazawa College of Art. She has been developing her practice in various residencies: in Peru, in Paris, and in East Asia, since completing an MA in Constructive Art at the University of Tsukuba, Japan in 2010. Using collage, photography, and video, her work creates a conversation between the external landscape and the body, creating an in-between space of analogy and metaphor.

Discover Rie's work on her website. She also contributed to Cahier 24 of the Cahier Series.

Elfriede Jelinek

Elfriede Jelinek was born in Mürzschlag, Austria, in 1946. She is the author of more than ten novels, among them The Piano Player (later a successful Michael Haneke movie starring Isabelle Huppert) and Children of the Dead. A prolific playwright, Jelinek was named Best Dramatist of the Year by Theater heute in 2007 and 2009, and has won the prestigious Mühlheim Prize for Best Play on four occasions, recently for Rechnitz in 2009 and Winter Journey in 2011. Her translations include works by Christopher Marlowe, Oscar Wilde, Georges Feydeau, and Thomas Pynchon. In 2004, Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Related links:

"Her Not All Her" (The Cahier Series, vol.18. Sylph Editions, October 2012)

Alan Jenkins

Alan Jenkins was educated in London and the University of Sussex, and has worked at the TLS since 1981, first as poetry and fiction editor and, for the past twelve years, as Deputy Editor. He has been poetry critic on the Observer and the Independent on Sunday, and has taught creative writing in London, Paris and the USA (Bread Loaf and Princeton and AUP). His books of poetry include In the Hot-House (1988), Greenheart (1990), Harm (1994), which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection that year, The Drift (2000), which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, The Little Black Book (2001). A Short History of Snakes, selected poems, was published in 2001 by Grove Press, New York. His latest collection, A Shorter Life, was published in April 2005 and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. He has published translations from the poems of Valery Larbaud and Bartolo Cataffi. In 2006 he won the Cholmondeley Award, given in recognition of a poet’s body of writing.

Related links:

"Drunken Boats" (The Cahier Series, vol.4. Sylph Editions, November 2007)
Contemporary Writers

Gabriel Josipovici

Gabriel Josipovici was born in France and educated in Egypt and in England. For many years he taught literature in the school of European studies at the University of Sussex. He has published over a dozen novels, three collections of sort stories, and six critical books, and his plays have been performed on the stage and on radio. His most recent books are A Life, a memoir/biography of his mother, the translator and poet Sacha Rabinovitch, Everything Passes, a 60-page narrative which one reviewer described as 'without doubt the best book published in 2006', and a volume of essays, The Singer on the Shore. Two new novels are scheduled to appear in 2009 and a volume of short stories in 2010. He reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, the Jewish Chronicle and the Irish Times.

Han Kang

Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, was published by Portobello Books in 2015 and won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. She is also the author of Human Acts and The White Book. She is based in Seoul.

William Kentridge

William Kentridge is one of South Africa’s pre-eminent artists, internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and opera productions. His work draws on varied sources, including philosophy, literature, early cinema, theatre and opera to create a complex universe where good and evil are complementary and inseparable forces.

Kentridge created the black-and-white prints in Cahier 25 of the Cahier Series which form a fantastical accompaniment to van Niekerk’s peculiar fable.

Dimitris Kleanthis

Dimitris Kleanthis was born in 1985 in Athens, Greece. He studied International and European Relations at the University of Pireaus, Criminology at Panteion University, and Photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. Since 2012 he has worked as a photographer, specializing in architectural photography in Greece and other countries of Europe. His work, both professional and personal has been featured in various magazines and media such, among others Wallpaper*, VICE, Condé Nast Traveller, Archdaily, and Athens Voice

website: www.dimitriskleanthis.com Youtube channel(@flaneur2020) : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw3JE5gm9vg6if8qGCTZMwg

Temporale (The Cahiers Series vol. 39, January 2023)

László Krasznahorkai

László Krasznahorkai was born in Hungary and lived in Japan and China before settling in Berlin. Three of his works have been made into award-winning films by the renowned filmmaker Béla Tarr: Werckmeister Harmonies, Satantango, and The Horse from Turin. He has written seven novels and won numerous prizes, including Best Book of the Year in Germany for his novel The Melancholy of Resistance. About his literary world the German novelist W. G. Sebald wrote: ‘the universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing’. American critic Susan Sontag called him ‘the Hungarian Master of Apocalypse’.

Related links:

"Animalinside" (The Cahier Series, vol.14. Sylph Editions, September 2010)

Javier Marías

Javier Marías, born in Madrid in 1951, has published thirteen novels, two collections of stories, and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-two languages, and he himself is a translator into Spanish of several English-language authors, including Robert Louis Stevenson and Laurence Sterne. He has won many international literary prizes, including the Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart so White. He is also the author of To Begin at the Beginning, no. 28 in the Cahier Series.

Lorna McIntosh

Lorna McIntosh RSA was born in 1974 in Inverness, Scotland and studied at Edinburgh College of Art. In 2012 she was elected an Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy.

In 2011 she was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and was also the recipient of an RSA/Creative Scotland ‘Residencies for Scotland’ Award.

Her recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Selvedge’, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh in 2018 and ‘Elective Affinities’, The Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh in 2012.

McIntosh’s work is held in numerous public collections including The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh; The Royal Academy, London; Edinburgh College of Art and Art in Healthcare Scotland.

Photo/ Anton Koslov Mayr

Olga Medvedkova

Born in Moscow, Olga Medvedkova went to a French school, then studied at Moscow University in the faculty of Art History.  Since 1991 she has lived in France, where she received her PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and her Habilitation from the Sorbonne. She worked as an art historian, journalist and translator, producing the bulk of her work in French. She is now a research director at the CNRS and is the author of numerous works on the history of art and architecture and critical essays. In 2013, she started to publish creative work – a play, short stories, fairy tales and two novels:  L’Education soviétique (winner of the Révélation Prize in 2014, awarded by the Société des Gens de Lettres) and, most recently, Les Anges stagiaires. In 2017 she received the Lequeux Prize from the Institut de France for the entirety of her critical and creative output.

Anna-Louise Milne

Anna-Louise Milne is Director of Research at the University of London Institute in Paris where she also runs the MA in Urban History and Culture in collaboration with Queen Mary University of London.  With a background in comparative literature, her work today is located at the intersection between urban sociology, multilingualism and cultural history. She’s also a regular participant in the collective work of Quartiers Solidaires in the La Chapelle district of Paris. The latter includes free breakfasts, opportunities to dance, writing and drawing activities, including the production of a series of one-off books called the Numimeserian Collection, written by and with people living the various consequences of forced displacement, held by the Vaclav Havel Paris Public Library. She writes in French and English, drawing on the possibilities of fiction as well as academic discourse. Recent publications include 75 (Gallimard, 2016), and essays in The New Internationalists, with Sue Clayton (Goldsmiths/MIT, 2020), Contemporary Fiction in French, with Russell Williams (CUP, 2021), The Australian Journal of French Studies (58.2: 2021), The South Atlantic Quarterly (122: 2023). Her Cahier entitled A General Practice, with paintings by Andy Robert, is number 37.

James E. Montgomery

James E. Montgomery was born in 1962 and grew up in Townhead and Dennistoun in the east end of Glasgow, with frequent spells in Benbecula, Uist. He is Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic and Fellow of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge. In the course of his life he has managed to publish a number of academic monographs and articles, survive stints as Chairman of his Faculty, Head of his Department, Senior and Graduate Tutor of his college, study for the priesthood, hold the Snell Exhibition at Balliol College, Oxford, play rugby union for Norway, contribute to BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and in 2009 attend the first royal wedding at Hampton Court since Henry VIII married Katherine Parr in 1543. He has taught at the Oxford College of Further Education, and at the Universities of Glasgow, Oslo and Leeds. He married his wife Yvonne in 1985 and they have three children, Natasha, Sam and Josh, and two dogs (Findus and Reggie). He is currently training to deadlift 200kg. His favourite place is the Isle of Barra.

Emmanuel Moses

Emmanuel Moses was born in Casablanca in 1959. He spent his childhood in Jerusalem and moved to Paris in 1986 where he has been living since. He is a writer and translator, working between Hebrew, German, English, and French. Amongst the authors he has translated are S.Y. Agnon, Yehuda Amichaï, and Raymond Carver. He is the author of twenty books of poetry and fiction, including most recently L'animal, (Flammarion), Le rêve passe (Gallimard), and He and I (translated by Marilyn Hacker and published by Oberlin College Press).

Neel Mukherjee

Neel Mukherjee was born in Calcutta and educated there and, subsequently, in Oxford, and Cambridge, where he did a PhD in early modern English literature and history. He worked for nearly ten years as a fiction reviewer for The Times (of London). His first novel, A Life Apart, was published in 2010 and won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain best fiction award. His second novel, The Lives of Others (2014), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Costa Best Novel award, and won the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award for best second novel. His third novel, A State of Freedom (2018), was a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program in the English Department at Harvard University. He divides his time between London and the USA.

Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, and the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry. He has been described by the Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War." His main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001) and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. His tenth collection, Horse Latitudes, appeared in the fall of 2006.

Related links:
"When The Pie Was Opened" (The Cahier Series, vol.8. Sylph Editions, May 2008)
Paul Muldoon's website
Princeton University
Contemporary Writers

Ottilie Mulzet

Ottilie Mulzet translates from Hungarian and Mongolian, and writes literary criticism. Her translation of Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai (New Directions) won the Best Translated Book Award for 2013. Her most recent translations include Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens by László Krasznahorkai (Seagull Books, 2015), as well as The Dispossessed and Berlin-Hamlet, both by Szilárd Borbély (HarperCollins and NYRB Poets, respectively). Forthcoming are Lazarus, by Gábor Schein (Seagull Books, 2017), as well as The Homecoming of Baron Wenckheim, by László Krasznahorkai (New Directions). Her critical writings have appeared on Asymptote, The Quarterly Conversation, and, other websites.

Franco Nasi

Franco Nasi  (1956) teaches Translation Theories at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He has written extensively on Romantic aesthetics, twentieth-century poetry and theater, and translation theory, and has translated contemporary American and English poets (Roger McGough and Billy Collins among others) into Italian. His most recent publications on translation theory include Traduzioni estreme (2015); L’artefice aggiunto. Riflessioni sulla traduzione in Italia 1900-1975 (2015) (ed.  with A. Albanese);  Specchi comunicanti (2010). He is also the author of Translator’s Blues (translated by Dan Gunn, The Cahiers Series, no. 26).

Max Neumann

Max Neumann was born in 1949 in Saarbruck, Germany, and lives in Berlin. He studied art in Karlsruhe and Berlin, and has been exhibiting since the late-1970s. He has had more than 150 solo exhibitions and his work is present in numerous national and international private and public collections. He is the recipient of many prizes, including the BDI (German Industry Federation), the Villa Romana Award (Florence), the Dr. Dietrich Schulz Foundation Award (Schleswig), the Award of the City of Iserlohn, and the Grand Prix de S.A.S le Prince Rainier III (Monaco).

Related links:
Max Neumann's website

Idra Novey

Idra Novey is the author of the debut novel Ways to Disappear, winner of the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her most recent poetry collection, Exit, Civilian, was selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, NPR’s All Things Con­sid­ered, New York Magazine, and The Paris Review. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endow­ment for the Arts, Poets & Writ­ers Mag­a­zine, the PEN Trans­la­tion Fund, the Poetry Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America. She’s also translated the work of several prominent Brazilian writers, most recently Clarice Lispector’s novel The Pas­sion Accord­ing to G.H. Idra was the author of "Clarice: The Visitor", vol. 23 of The Cahier Series.

Lino Pertile

Lino Pertile is currently Harvard College Professor, Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Master of Eliot House, Harvard University. A graduate of the University of Padua, where he studied Classics and French, before joining Harvard (1995) he taught Italian Literature in France and Italy (1964-68), and in Britain (1968-1995: Universities of Reading '68-'73, Sussex '74-'88, and Edinburgh, '88-'95). He has published essays on the French and Italian Renaissance, in particular on Montaigne and French travelers to Italy. His research has focused on the Latin and Italian Middle Ages (Dante), the Renaissance (Bembo and Trifon Gabriele), and 20th century Italian literature (Pavese and the contemporary novel). He has coedited, and contributed to: The New Italian Novel (Edinburgh University Press 1993, paperback 1997), The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (Cambridge University Press 1996, paperback 1999), In amicizia. Essays in Honour of Giulio Lepschy (The Italianist 1998), and La scena del mondo. Studi sul teatro per Franco Fido, Ravenna, Longo, 2006, 350 pp. He has published extensively on Dante. His books include the critical edition of the 16th century commentary on Dante Annotationi nel Dante fatte con M. Triphon Gabriele (1993), and the volumes La puttana e il gigante: dal Cantico dei Cantici al Paradiso terrestre di Dante (1998, Premio Zingarelli), and La punta del disio. Semantica del desiderio nella Commedia, Firenze, Cadmo, 2005.

Ralph Petty

Ralph Petty was born in the United States in 1952 and came to Paris in 1976 to work in the etching studio of Stanley Hayter, Atelier 17, since which time he has remained in France. He taught at Parsons School of Design Paris, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, and since 1990 has taught drawing and painting at The American University of Paris where he is also the University Curator. His paintings and drawings concentrate on the contemporary human figure and landscape. Recent exhibitions include the Haus Kasuya Museum, Kamakura, Japan, the Novosibirsk National Museum, Novosibirsk, Russia, and numerous gallery shows in Japan and France. His book of drawings, Démons quotidiens, with Canadian writer Nancy Huston, was published in 2011. He is also a musician and composer and created the Ralph Trio.

Related links:
Ralph Petty's website

Richard Pevear

Richard Pevear works mainly as a literary translator, translating from French, Italian, Spanish, and (in collaboration with Larissa Volokhonsky) from Russian. He has published some twenty-six books, including works by Alain, Yves Bonnefoy, and Alberto Savinio, and a series of Russian classics. He has also published two collections of poetry.  He has been a recipient of fellowships in translation from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the French Ministry of Culture, and has twice been awarded the PEN Translation Prize, in 1991 for The Brothers Karamazov, and in 2002 for Anna Karenina. In 2003 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters by Allegheny College (his alma mater).  He has been a visiting professor at the University of Iowa, the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts, Mt. Holyoke College, and The Cooper Union. In 1998 he joined the faculty of AUP, where he teaches a sequence of three courses in Russian literature and has offered a senior seminar in literary translation.

William Pownall

William Pownall was born in England but spent thirteen formative years in Australia. He studied at the National Art School in Sydney. He also studied music and became a professional jazz musician. In 1963 he visited Greece for the first time, where what he discovered decided him to become a full-time painter. An exhibition in Athens in 1978 led to a meeting with Odysseus Elytis, the Greek poet and Nobel prize winner, who became a collector of his work and who commissioned him to produce the cover and frontispiece for a book of his poetry. Pownall, 'primarily an abstract painter', as he thinks of himself, lives on the island of Hydra. He has exhibited widely, in England, Germany, and Greece.

Related links:
William Pownall's Gallery

Lanfranco Quadrio

Born in 1966, Lanfranco Quadrio lives and works in Palermo. He learned engraving with his father Guido and engraved his first etching in 1978. In 1989, he finished his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo with a thesis on artistic anatomy. In 1992, he was appointed Professor at the School of Art in Palermo. He exhibits regularly in Italy, in Switzerland, and in France.

Related links:
"Nay Rather" (The Cahier Series, vol 21, Sylph Editions, May 2014)
Lanfranco Quadrio's Gallery

Andy Robert

Andy Robert (b. 1984, Les Cayes, Haiti) is a painter who conceptually negotiates abstraction with recognizable imagery; his paintings wrestle between the lyrical and the concrete. They draw from a breadth of historical and personal references, in a play of content and form – a play which enjoys the tinkering that comes with painting pictures. Through experimentation Robert has arrived at a deeply personal and an inventive, deconstructive approach to painting that relies on the premise that images are to be bent and folded, taken apart and put back together again; a belief that art is a philosophical means to look at and examine things—to question, test ideas, and engage with the world. And that in painting a picture something is being taken apart to put back together; there is an inherent risk in breaking it. A diasporic Haitian-American immigrant and painter, Andy Robert views the world critically as a contradiction of mass-communication and increased voicelessness. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 

Hana Sakuma

Hana Sakuma was born in 1970, in Japan. Between 1995 and 1997 she studied sculpture in MFA at Slade School of Fine Art, University College of London before going on study PhD in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London. Between 2006 and 2009 she worked as an honorary research fellow for professor and artist Edward Allington who was conducting his research project on contemporary Japanese sculpture at the Slade. She is currently associate professor teaching in Graduate School of Arts and Design and Department of Arts & Crafts at Kobe Design University.

Discover Hana's work on her website. She also contributed to Cahier 33 of the Cahier Series.    

Damion Searls

Damion Searls is the author of What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going (stories) and is currently writing a history of the Rorschach test and the first biography of its artist/inventor, Hermann Rorschach. He edited the abridged edition of Thoreau's The Journal: 1837-1861 and has translated Proust, Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf, Nescio, Thomas Bernhard, and others; his translation of Hans Keilson's Comedy in a Minor Key was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His forthcoming translations include A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories by Robert Walser and a retranslation of Hermann Hesse's Demian. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.

Olivia E. Sears

Olivia E. Sears is the founder and president of the Center for the Art of Translation (CAT), a non-profit organization that promotes international literature through programs in bilingual education (including the award-winning Poetry Inside Out program that teaches young children to translate poetry); through publications such as TWO LINES: World Writing in Translation, an annual anthology of world literature translated into English; and through an acclaimed reading series featuring some of the world’s finest translators. In addition to being the long-time editor of TWO LINES, Olivia is a translator of poetry from the Italian and the author of Self/Cell, a collection of original poetry with photographs by Aline Mare. She is the editor of The Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction, forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press as part of the NEA’s international literary exchange, and is also co-translator and co-editor of A Primer of Italian Fascism.

Rachel Shihor

Rachel Shihor has taught philosophy at Tel Aviv University and is an accomplished editor, working for several academic publishers. She has published both fiction and works of scholarship, among which are Lectures on Philosophy and Religion (1987, now in its fifth reprint), and Nietzsche: Thoughts on Western Civilization (1990). Her two published novels are The Vast Kingdom (2005) and The Tel Avivians (2006); her short stories appear regularly in various literary magazines. Days Bygone is her first work of fiction to be translated into English.

Deborah Smith

Deborah Smith's translations from the Korean include The Vegetarian, Human Acts and The White Book by Han Kang, and A Greater Music and Recitation by Bae Suah. In 2015 Deborah founded Tilted Axis Press, publishing cult, contemporary Asian writing. In 2016 her translation of The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize and an LTI Korea Award. She also won an Arts Foundation Award for her work as a translator both on and off the page, which includes teaching, mentoring, consultancy and reviewing. She tweets as @londonkoreanist.

 Ngugi wa Thiong'o

One of the leading writers and scholars at work today, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. He is the author of A Grain of Wheat; Weep Not, Child; and Petals of Blood, as well as Birth of a Dream Weaver, Wrestling with the Devil, Minutes of Glory, and The Perfect Nine (all from The New Press). Currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine, Ngũgĩ is the recipient of twelve honorary doctorates, among other awards, and has been nominated for the Man Booker International Prize.

John L. Tran

John L. Tran studied Intellectual History & French at Sussex University before going on to study an MA and PhD in Photography at the University of the Arts, London. He currently works as a part-time university lecturer in Japan, teaching classes in art history and photography, while pursuing his art career, and is also a regular contributor to the Japan Times.

Related links:

John L Tran, Photographer
"The Tilted Cup: Noh Stories" (The Cahier Series, vol 22, May 2014, Sylph Editions, May 2014)

Bernard Turle

Bernard Turle was born in Toulon in 1955. After spending much of his professional life in Paris, he settled back in his family house at the age of forty to become a full-time freelance translator. A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud, he was a teacher of English before moving to publishing, helping to start the literary magazine Le Promeneur and the French branch of London-based publisher Thames and Hudson. He started to translate professionally in 1981. He is a recipient of the Prix Coindreau (for best translation of a book of American fiction) and the Prix Baudelaire (for best translation of a book of British fiction). He has translated more than a hundred books and as many articles. He is the official French translator of T.C. Boyle, Peter Ackroyd, Rupert Thomson and André Brink, and in addition specializes in books by authors from the Subcontinent (India and Pakistan), such as V.S. Naipaul, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Sudhir Kakar, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Manu Joseph, and Mohammed Hanif. A specialist of India, which he sees as “the republic of translation”, he is the author of Bombay Mix Mumbai Max, an account of his thirty years of travels and friendships in India, seen through the lens of the 2008 bombings in Mumbai. He is currently translating a book of essays by V.S. Naipaul and has been invited to translate Alan Hollinghurt's latest novel, The Stranger's Child.

Related links:

"Diplomat, Actor, Translator, Spy" (The Cahier Series, vol.19. Sylph Editions, April 2013)

Theodore Ushev

Theodore Ushev was born in Kyustendil, Bulgaria, in 1968 and graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia. He first made a name for himself as a poster artist in his native country before settling in Montreal in 1999. Ushev found fertile ground for developing his own original artistic style at the National Film Board of Canada. The Man Who Waited and Tzaritza (2006) quickly earned the respect of audiences and peers, as did his acclaimed trilogy on the relationship between art and power: Tower Bawher (2006), Drux Flux (2008) and Gloria Victoria (2013). With Vertical (2003), Sou (2004) and Demoni (2012), Ushev solidified his reputation as an inquisitive and daring artist by exploring new content-delivery platforms. His 16-time award winner Lipsett Diaries (2010), narrated by Xavier Dolan, examined the pioneering work and tragic destiny of Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett.

Ushev quickly followed with Nightingale in December (2011), Joda (2012) and Third Page from the Sun (2014), a scathing reflection on the future of books. In Blood Manifesto (2014), a poetic and ferocious short which Ushev animated with his own blood, he ponders whether ideals are worth spilling blood for. His latest project, Blind Vaysha (2015), is a philosophical tale about the importance of living in the moment. The film was nominated for Best Animated Short Film Oscar at 2017 Academy of Motion Pictures awards.

Drawings made specially for the text by Theodore Ushev adorn the cahier 29 of the Cahier Series.

Ivan Vladislavić

Ivan Vladislavić is the author of the novels The Folly, The Restless Supermarket, The Exploded View and Double Negative. His most recent publication is a book of short fictions called 101 Detectives. Among his other books are Portrait with Keys, an account of life in Johannesburg, and The Loss Library, a reflection on writing. His early stories appear in the compendium volume Flashback Hotel. He sometimes works with visual artists and has edited volumes on architecture and art. He has also published a monograph on the conceptual artist Willem Boshoff. His work has won many awards, including the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction and Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. As an editor, he has worked with some of South Africa’s major writers. In 2015, he was appointed a Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Related links:

"A Labour of Moles" (The Cahier Series, vol.17. Sylph Editions, December 2011)

Larissa Volokhonsky

Larissa Volokhonsky was born in Leningrad, attended Leningrad State University, and on graduating joined a scientific team whose work took her to the far-east of Russia, to Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island.  She emigrated to Israel in 1973, and to the United States in 1975, where she attended Yale Divinity School and St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary.  Soon after settling in New York City, she was married to Richard Pevear, and a few years later they moved to France with their two children.  Together, Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated twenty books from the Russian, including works by Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky.  The latest to be published is Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak.  Their translation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov received the PEN Translation Prize for 1991; their translation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was awarded the same prize in 2002.  In 2006 they were awarded the first Efim Etkind International Translation Prize by the European Graduate School of St. Petersburg.

Marina Warner

Marina Warner was brought up speaking French and Italian, and has written fiction, criticism and cultural history . Her award-winning books include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. In 2021 she published a memoir of her childhood in Cairo (Inventory of a Life Mislaid). Since 2016, she has been working with the project Stories in Transit in Palermo, Sicily, and is currently writing a book about the concept of Sanctuary. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Temporale (The Cahiers Series vol. 39, January 2023)

Alison Watt

Alison Watt OBE FRSE RSA has held major solo exhibitions at The National Gallery, London, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art , Edinburgh, Kelvingove Art Gallery & Museum, Glasgow, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museum, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, Perth Museum & Art Gallery. She was nominated for The Jerwood Painting Prize in 2003. In 2005 she won the ACE Award for Art in a Religious Context for her work Still , a permanent installation at Old St. Paul's, Edinburgh. Between 2006 and 2008 Watt undertook the prestigious residency as Associate Artist at The National Gallery London. Watt’s work is held in numerous public collections including The National Portrait Gallery, London, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, The Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, Southampton City Art Gallery, The British Council Collection, London, The U.S. Department of State Collection and The Uffizi in Florence.

Edmund White

Edmund White has written some twenty books. He is perhaps best known for his biography of French writer Jean Genet, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a trilogy of autobiographical novels—A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. He has written a brief life of Marcel Proust and a book about unconventional Paris called The Flaneur. His most recent works of fiction are Chaos and Hotel de Dream. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches writing at Princeton and lives in New York City.

Sylvia Whitman

Born in Paris in 1981, Sylvia Whitman was educated in Edinburgh, then studied History of Eastern Europe at University College London. For the last five years, she has been running Shakespeare & Company in Paris, perpetuating the spirit of this legendary bookshop. In 2003 she created the first Shakespeare and Company Literary Festival "Lost, Beat and New: Three Generations of Literature in Paris". This was followed in 2006 by « FestivalandCo », a biennial literary festival which focuses on a particular literary genre. After "Travel in Words" in 2006, Sylvia and her team are preparing for "Real Lives: Exploring Memoir and Biography" in June 2008. Sylvia's other passion is acting, and she has been in plays such as Gigi (directed by Caroline Huppert), A Midsummer Night's Dream staged at Shakespeare and Company, The Importance of Being Earnest and L'Auberge Espagnole, a play in French adapted from the film by Cedric Klapisch.

Terry Winters

Terry Winters was born in New York in 1949 and received a BFA from Pratt Institute in 1971. His work has been the subject of numerous museum surveys. These include the Tate Gallery, London; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; IVAM, Centre Julio Gonzales, Valencia; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Basel; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

Retrospectives of his drawings and prints have been organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; and The Drawing Center, New York. A complete archive of his printed works is held at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine.  

In 2013, Winters was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York and Los Angeles.

Winters lives in New York and Columbia County, NY. 

Peter Wortsman

Born in 1952 in New York, the son of Viennese Jewish refugees, Peter Wortsman is the author of work in multiple modes, including a book of short fiction, A Modern Way To Die (1991); two stage plays, The Tattooed Man Tells All (2000) and Burning Words (2006); a travel memoir, Ghost Dance in Berlin, A Rhapsody in Gray (2013)—recipient of a 2014 Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY); and a dystopian novel, Cold Earth Wanderers (2014). His translations from the German include Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, by Robert Musil, now in its third edition (1988, 2005, 2009); Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg (2005); Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist (2010); Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm (2013); Tales of the German Imagination (2013), an anthology which he also edited and annotated for Penguin Classics; and Konundrum, Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, forthcoming in 2016. He was a fellow of the Fulbright Foundation (1973) at the Albert Ludwig Universität in Freiburg; the Thomas J. Watson Foundation (1974) in Vienna; a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (2010); and the recipient of an Übersetzerstipendium (Translation Fellowship) from the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Literatur in Vienna in 2016.

Related links: 

https://archipelagobooks.org/book_translator/wortsman-peter/

Gao Xingjian

GAO Xingjian was born in China in 1940, graduated from the French department of the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute in 1962, and was employed as a translator from 1962 to 1970, following which he spent five years doing labour in the countryside. After his first play was produced at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre, performances of his second play, Bus Stop, were halted by the authorities in 1983. Gao was granted political refugee status in France in 1989 after writing the play Escape, following the events of Tiananmen Square, and his works have been banned in China ever since. He was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1992 and became a French citizen in 1997. His novels include Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible and his paintings have been exhibited in Europe, Asia, and North America. In 2000 Gao Xingjian was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and named Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur. He made his first film in 2006 shortly before completing his latest play, Ballade nocturne.

Related links:

"Ballade Nocturne" (The Cahier Series, vol.13. Sylph Editions, March 2010)