Writers & Translators
Translators and authors published by Two Lines Press and contributors to the Calico series.
Ines Abassi
Ines Abassi is a Tunisian writer. She has published three volumes of poetry and two collections of short stories. Her first novel appeared in 2017. From 2014 to 2016, Abassi served as the executive publisher of Dar Anahla Saghira. Her work has been translated into English, Danish, French, Korean, and Swedish.
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Eric Abrahamsen
Eric Abrahamsen is the recipient of translation grants from PEN and the NEA and has written for the New York Times, among others. In 2012 Penguin published his translation of The Civil Servant’s Notebook by Wang Xiaofang. He lives in Beijing, where he hosts the acclaimed website on Chinese literature, Paper Republic.
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Caio Fernando Abreu
One of the most influential and original Brazilian writers of short fiction of the 1980s and ’90s, Caio Fernando Abreu is the author of twelve story collections set and published during the military dictatorship and the AIDS epidemic in Brazil. He has been awarded major literary prizes, including the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Fiction a total of three times. He died of AIDS in Porto Alegre in 1996. He was forty-seven years old.
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Natalia Affonso
Natalia Affonso is a translator, teacher, researcher, and activist who sometimes writes poetry as well. She’s from Rio de Janeiro, where she created and hosted the literary salon Sapatão & Ficção. She holds an MA in English-language literature and is currently pursuing her PhD in comparative literature at UC Irvine, focusing on Caribbean and Brazilian queer/cuíer/lesbian literature.
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Farkhondeh Aghaei
Farkhondeh Aghaei is one of the leaders of a highly successful wave of women writers in post-revolutionary Iran. She harnesses magical realism to express feminist themes and explore class divides. Following an initial burst of productivity in the 1990s, Aghaei’s acclaimed literary career—which treats topics as diverse as the transgender experience and religious persecution—began to face opposition from state censors. Her novel Zanī bā Zanbīl (Woman with basket) was finally published in 2015 with significant cuts to the original manuscript after languishing under review for nearly a decade.
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Naja Marie Aidt
Naja Marie Aidt was born in Greenland and raised in Copenhagen. She is the author of seven collections of poetry and five short story collections, including Baboon, which won the 2008 Nordic Council Literature Prize. (Photo credit: Open Letter Books)
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Martin Aitken
Martin Aitken is a widely published translator of Danish literature. He received the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize in 2012. He has translated numerous books, including Dorthe Nors’ Karate Chop, and he co-translated volume 6 of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle with Don Bartlett.
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Fadhil al-Azzawi
Fadhil al-Azzawi was born in Kirkuk, northern Iraq, in 1940. He has a BA in English literature from Baghdad University and a PhD in journalism from Leipzig University. He edited literary magazines and newspapers in Iraq and abroad and has been publishing his poetry since the 1960s. He left Iraq in 1977 and settled in Germany. He has published numerous volumes of poetry, six novels, one collection of short stories, two works of criticism, and many translations from English and German into Arabic. He is a contributing editor of Banipal magazine.
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Moneera Al-Ghadeer
Moneera Al-Ghadeer is the author of Desert Voices: Bedouin Women’s Poetry in Saudi Arabia (I.B. Tauris, 2009) as well as many articles, book chapters, and translations. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to become a tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Additionally, she was a visiting professor of comparative literature in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University and a Shawwaf Visiting Professor at Harvard University.
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Bakhtiyar Ali
Bakhtiyar Ali is a prolific Kurdish novelist, essayist, and poet born in the city of Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1960. He began his career as a poet and essayist but later established himself as an influential novelist. He was unable to publish most of his work before 1991 due to the strict censorship under Saddam Hussein. In 2017, he received Germany’s prestigious Nelly Sachs Prize, marking the first time the prize was awarded to a writer working in a non-European language. In 2016 his novel Ghezelnus u baxekani xeyal was published in English as I Stared at the Night of the City in Kareem Abdulrahman’s translation. It was the first Kurdish-language novel to be published in English. Since the mid-1990s, Ali has been living in Germany.
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Shirzad Alipour
Shirzad Alipour was born in 1989 in Sardasht, Iran. After graduating with an MA in English literature in 2013, he began teaching English. He is a voracious reader of English literature.
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Elina Alter
Elina Alter is a writer and translator. Her translations of Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love (Deep Vellum) and Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound (Catapult) are forthcoming. She is the editor of Circumference, a magazine of translation and international culture.
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Jeffrey Angles
Jeffrey Angles is a poet, translator, and professor at Western Michigan University. His collection of Japanese-language poetry won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. His translations of feminist and queer writers from Japan have won numerous awards. Among his recent translations are the feminist writer Itō Hiromi’s contemporary classic The Thorn Puller, the queer poet Takahashi Mutsuo’s poetry collection Only Yesterday, and the science-fiction author Kayama Shigeru’s 1950s novels Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again.
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Nadia Anjuman
Nadia Anjuman was an Afghani poet and the author of Gul-e-dodi (Dark Flower) and Yek Sàbad Délhoreh (An Abundance of Worry). A gifted student of literature at Herat University, she died in November 2005 at the age of twenty-five after being physically assaulted by her husband.
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Johannes Anyuru
Johannes Anyuru is a poet, novelist, and playwright. He debuted in 2003 with the critically acclaimed collection of poems Only The Gods Are New. They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears was awarded the August Prize and film rights have been acquired by Momento Film. Anyuru’s work has been likened to a mix between Nobel Laureate Thomas Tranströmer and a hip-hop MC.
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Diana Arterian
Diana Arterian is the author of the chapbook Death Centos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and her writing and translations have appeared in Aufgabe, Black Warrior Review, Circumference, DIAGRAM, Eleven Eleven, Salt Hill, Two Serious Ladies, and The Volta, among others. A poetry editor at Noemi Press, she lives in Los Angeles, where she is earning her PhD in literature and creative writing.
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Jazmina Barrera
Jazmina Barrera was born in Mexico City in 1988. She was a fellow at the Foundation for Mexican Letters and at Mexico’s Fonca’s Program for young writers. She was a beneficiary of the residencies at Casa Estudio Cien años de Soledad. She has published work in various print and digital media, such as The Paris Review, El Malpensante, Words Without Borders, El País, The New York Times and Electric Literature. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University, which she completed with the support of a Fulbright grant. She is the author of four books in Spanish: Cuerpo extraño, Cuaderno de faros, Linea nigra and the children’s book, Los nombres de los animales and Punto de cruz. Her books have been published in nine countries and translated to English, Dutch, Portuguese Italian and French. Her book of essays Cuerpo extraño (Foreign Body) was awarded the Latin American Voices prize by Literal Publishing in 2013. Cuaderno de faros was long listed for the von Rezzori award. The English version of Cuaderno de faros, On Lighthouses, (Two Lines Press, 2020) was chosen for the Indie Next list by Indie Bound. Linea Nigra was a finalist for the National Book Critics Cricle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Autobiography Prize, CANIEM’s Book of the year award and the Amazon Primera Novela (First Novel) Award. She is editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope. She lives in Mexico City. Author photo by Rodrigo Jardón.
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Carol Bensimon
Carol Bensimon was born in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, in 1982. She is the author of the story collection Pó de parede and three novels, Sinuca embaixo d’água, O clube dos jardineiros de Fumaça, and Todos nós adorávamos caubóis, the latter published in English translation as We All Loved Cowboys (Transit Books). In 2012, Carol was selected by Granta as one of the Best Young Brazilian Novelists. She lives in Mendocino, California.
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Brian Bergstrom
Brian Bergstrom is a Montréal-based lecturer and translator. His translations have appeared in publications including Granta, Aperture, LitHub, Mechademia, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, and Elemental: Earth Stories. His translation of Trinity, Trinity, Trinity by Erika Kobayashi (Astra House, 2022) won the 2022 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. His most recent translation is Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (Astra House, 2024) by Marxist philosopher Kōhei Saitō.
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Sarah Booker
Born in Durham, North Carolina, Sarah Booker is a PhD student in the Romance Studies department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she focuses on contemporary Latin American literature and translation. She translates from Spanish to English and her work has appeared in Latin American Literature Today, Translation Review, and Palabras Errantes, among others. Her translation of Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest was published with the Feminist Press in October 2017.
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Basir Borhani
Basir Borhani was born in 1990 in Oshnaviyeh, Iran. He has an MA in English literature and was assistant editor of fiction/essay in translation for Hamshahri Dastan magazine from November 2015 through August 2017. His Farsi and Kurdish translations of short stories, literary essays, and memoirs have been published in various literary magazines in Iran. He currently lives in Iran and works as a freelance translator of English, Kurdish, and Farsi.
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Hemley Boum
Hemley Boum is the author of four novels, including Les Maquisards, which received the Grand prix littéraire de l’Afrique Noire, and Days Come and Go (Les jours viennent et passent), winner of the Prix Amadou Kourouma, which has been translated into both German and Dutch. She regularly publishes articles in Jeune Afrique, Le Point Afrique and Le Monde Afrique, and speaks at colloquia, universities, and literary festivals. Hemley has conducted masterclasses in France, Réunion, Cameroon, and Congo, and since 2019 she has been involved in “La Fabrique de Souza”, a series of literary salons in Douala, Cameroon. Hemley was born in Cameroon, where she studied anthropology before relocating to Lille, France, to study international trade. She currently lives in Paris, France.
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Dorota Brauntsch
Journalist and photographer Dorota Brauntsch studied journalism at the University of Wrocław and the Danish School of Journalism in Aarhus. Her photography and reporting project “Ceglane Domy” (“Brick Houses”), documenting the vanishing traditional brick houses of the Pszczyna region of Silesia, was covered by major Polish news publications including Polityka and Gazeta Wyborcza. In 2017 she received a fellowship to expand that project into her first book, Domy bezdomne (Homeless homes), which was published in 2019. (Photo credit: Radoslaw Kazmierczak)
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Natascha Bruce
Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese. Her work includes Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon, Bloodline by Patigül, Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong, and Mystery Train by Can Xue. Her translation of Dorothy Tse’s poem “Cloth Birds” was a winner of the 2019 Words Without Borders Poems in Translation Prize.
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Sean Gasper Bye
Sean Gasper Bye’s translations from Polish include The King of Warsaw by Szczepan Twardoch and Ellis Island: A People’s History by Małgorzata Szejnert. He studied Polish at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and spent five years as literature and humanities curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York. He is a winner of the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship.
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Nancy Naomi Carlson
Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet and translator whose translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull, 2021) won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Decorated with the French Academic Palms and twice awarded NEA literature translation grants, she’s the author of An Infusion of Violets (Seagull Books, 2019), named “New & Noteworthy” by The New York Times. She’s the translation editor for On the Seawall.