Writers in residence 2022
A few words about the writers in residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation in 2022…
Alexandre Chollier, Switzerland
(in residence from 24 January to 23 February)
Born in 1970, Alexandre Chollier is a geographer by profession. He divides his time between teaching in Geneva, doing research, and writing. The author of Autour du cairn (2010, re-edited in 2019) and Les dimensions du monde (2016), both published by Héros-Limite, he also writes a regular column for Le Courrier where he brings together his readings of books and current events. He is director of the imprint “géographie(s)” at Héros-Limite.
Cressida Peever, United Kingdom
(in residence from 25 January to 24 February)
Cressida Peever is a British writer and dramaturg based in London. Her writing is focused on female-led and unheard stories. Her playwriting includes immersive theatre shows Divine Proportions (2018-19) and Red Palace (2019-20), both of which ran for seventeen weeks at The Vaults, London. Red Palace was seen by over 12,000 audience members and chosen by The Stage as one of its top picks of 2019. She is currently developing her first TV drama with Woolyback Productions.
https://www.cressidapeever.com/
Marco Martella, Italy
(in residence from 25 January to 22 February)
Born in Rome, the writer and gardener Marco Martella lives and works in France. At the point where the essay and fiction meet, his books, including Le jardin perdu (Actes Sud, 2011), Un petit monde, un monde parfait (Poesis, 2018), and Fleurs (Actes Sud, 2021), have been published in both Italian and Spanish as well. In 2010, he founded the review Jardins, which explores the poetic, philosophical and existential dimensions that connect humans with nature and the landscape.
Violaine Schwartz, France
(in residence from 27 January to 17 February)
A graduate of the Théâtre national of Strasbourg, Violaine Schwartz is a French actor and writer. She is the author of plays for radio and stage – IO 467 (Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2013), Comment on freine ? (P.O.L, 2015), J’empêche, peur du chat, que mon moineau ne sorte (P.O.L, 2017) – several novels, published by P.O.L. – La tête en arrière (2010), Le vent dans la bouche (2013, awarded the Prix Eugène Dabit du Roman Populiste), Une forêt dans la tête (2021) – and a collection of testimonials titled Papiers (2019; Papers, translated by Christine Gutman).
Adrien Blouët, France
(in residence from 27 January to 4 March)
Born in 1992, Adrien Blouët is a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where he discovered anthropology, a discipline that eventually led to his writing fiction. In 2017, he joined the Offshore School located in Shanghai, China, a training and research program that allows young artists to confront their work with the context of globalization through an active immersion in one of the most representative megacities of the economic and cultural mutations of the contemporary world. He then travels to Japan. His novels, L’absence de ciel (2019) and Les immeubles de fer (2021), have been published by Noir sur Blanc under their “Notabilia” imprint.
Amanda Prat Giral, France
(in residence from 24 February to 25 March)
Amanda Prat-Giral grew up in a trilingual environment. She graduated from ESIT with a Master’s degree in technical translation and went on to earn a second Master’s in literary translation from Paris 7, before beginning a career as a freelance translator. She has worked for several UN organizations since 2014, as well as the publisher Actes Sud, translating in particular a number of essays on ecology for Actes Sud’s “Domaine du possible” imprint.
Katie Kitamura, United States
(in residence from 2 to 17 March)
Katie Kitamura, born in 1979, brought up in California and Japan. She is a novelist, journalist and art critic based in New York. She is the author of four novels, Intimacies (Penguin Books, 2021, nominated for the National Book Award), A Separation (Riverhead Books, 2017, finalist for the Premio von Rezzori), Gone to the Forest (Free Press, 2012, finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award), and The Longshot (Free Press, 2009, finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award). Her work has been translated into eighteen languages. She is a clinical associate professor teaching in the creative writing program at New York University.
Dariusz Krawczyk, Poland
(in residence from 2 to 30 March)
Dariusz Krawczyk, a historian of French literature and culture specializing in Renaissance literature, teaches at the Institute of Romance Studies at the University of Warsaw. He is the author of numerous articles and has co-edited several books, including Femmes et le savoir / Women and Knowledge / Frauen und Wissen (Classiques Garnier, 2020) on the cultural history of women and their access to knowledge.
Nicolas Cavaillès, France
(in residence from 8 to 24 March)
Born in 1981 in Saint-Jean-sur-Veyle, France, the translator and writer Nicolas Cavaillès has translated into French some of the great voices of Romanian literature, including Gabriela Adameşteanu, Mircea Cărtărescu, Nicoleta Esinencu, Norman Manea, Ileana Mălăncioiu, Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu, Dumitru Tsepeneag, and Urmuz. He is moreover the editor of the prestigious Pléiade edition of Cioran’s French writings and the author himself of a number of literary works, notably Vie de monsieur Leguat (Le Sonneur, 2013, Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle 2014) Pourquoi le saut des baleines (Le Sonneur, 2015, Prix Gens de Mer 2015), Rotroldiques (Marguerite Waknine, 2019) and recently Le temps de Tycho (José Corti, 2021).
Daniel Galera, Brazil
(in residence from 1 to 31 March)
Born in 1979, the Brazilian writer and translator Daniel Galera lives and works in Porto Alegre. He has published five novels, most notably Barba Ensopada de Sangue (Companhia das Letras, 2012), the winner of the São Paulo Prize for Novels in 2012 and widely translated (the English translation, Blood-Drenched Beard, was brought out by Penguin Books in 2014). His most recent novel, Meia-Noite e Vinte (Companhia das Letras, 2016), is available in English as Twenty After Midnight (Penguin Books, 2020). He has also translated into Portuguese fiction by a variety of major English-language authors, including David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Irvine Welsh, and John Cheever.
Jan Maria Kłoczowski, Poland
(in residence from 8 to 23 March)
Born in 1960 in Lublin, Poland, Jan Maria Kłoczowski is a translator of French literature, a poet, and a historian, as well as a violinist. A member of the Association des traducteurs littéraires and the PEN Club, he has done Polish versions of works by Marguerite Yourcenar, Tzvetan Todorov, Alain Besançon, and Patrick Deville.
Burhan Sönmez, Turkey
(in residence from 9 to 23 March)
Burhan Sönmez was born in Turkey in 1965 and grew up speaking Turkish and Kurdish. He worked as a lawyer for a number of years in Istanbul specialized in human rights before moving to Britain as a political exile. He has written for a number of publications, including The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and La Repubblica. He has translated William Blake’s poems into Turkish. He is the author of four novels in Turkish, which have been translated into forty languages, including, in English, Sins and Innocents (Garnet Publishing, 2014), Istanbul Istanbul (OR Books, 2016), and Labyrinth (Other Press, 2019). He received the Disturbing the Peace Award from the Vaclav Havel Library and the EBRD Literature Prize. He is a board member of PEN International.
Aleksander Kaczorowski, Poland
(in residence from 14 March to 5 April)
Aleksander Kaczorowski, born in 1969, is a Polish journalist, editor, translator and author of biographical works, the most recent of which is Ota Pavel. Pod powierzchnią (Czarne, 2018), which won the 2018 Warsaw Literary Award for the Book of the Year and the Upper Silesian Literary Award Juliusz for the best Polish biography of 2018, and was shortlisted for the Nike Literary Award. His other biographies are Hrabal. Słodka apokalipsa (Czarne, 2016) and Havel. Zemsta bezsilnych (Czarne, 2014).
Ralf Webb, United Kingdom
(in residence from 23 March to 20 April)
Ralf Webb, born in 1991, grew up in the West Country and now lives in London. He co-ran the Swimmers pamphlet and event series, the PoetryxClass reading group project, and, from 2017 to 2021, worked as Managing Editor at The White Review. His writing has appeared widely, including in the London Review of Books, Poetry Review, PAIN, Test Centre, Prototype, Hotel, Oxford Poetry and Fantastic Man. He has recently published his first collection: Rotten Days in Late Summer (Penguin Books, 2021).
Yvette Siegert, United Kingdom
(in residence from 28 March to 22 April)
Yvette Siegert is a British poet, critic, and translator from Spanish and French. Her writing has appeared in many publications, most recently in Aufgabe, Boston Review, St. Petersburg Review, Stonecutter, and The Literary Review. Her translation of Chantal Maillard’s Killing Plato (New Directions, 2019) was shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and her translation of Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 (New Directions, 2016) won the Best Translated Book Award. She is completing a doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Oxford.
Constance Joly, France
(in residence from 31 March to 29 April)
Constance Joly was born in 1969 and worked for over twenty years as an editor at Hachette, Le Seuil, and Bayard. Ten years ago she founded her own literary agency. She has published a graphic novel with Séverine Vidal and Barroux, La belle absente (Les Enfants Rouges, 2017), and two novels with the Flammarion publishing house, Le matin est un tigre (2019, a finalist for the Prix de la Closerie des Lilas) and Over the Rainbow (2021, Prix Orange du Livre).
Nathalie Yot, France
(in residence from 5 April to 3 May)
Born in Strasbourg in 1966, the multidisciplinary French author, singer-songwriter, and performer Nathalie Yot, or NatYot, lives and works in Montpellier. Although she graduated with a degree in architecture, she preferred to focus initially on music, moving on to a poetic form of writing and publishing in particular Le nord du monde (La Contre Allée, 2018), Janis Joplin (Hoëbeke, 2020), and, at Éditions La boucherie littéraire L’amour : bouquet final (2019) and Ils : défaut de langue (2021). She also develops projects for the stage, runs writing workshops, and is regularly invited to a range of festivals to recite her texts, either alone or accompanied by musicians or dancers.
Asghar Nouri, Iran
(in residence from 7 April to 31 May)
Asghar Nouri was born 1976 in Tabriz, Iran, and lives and works in Tehran, where he is active as a translator, dramatist, director, and teacher. He has translated into Farsi some forty works by French-speaking writers, including Agota Kristof, Patrick Modiano, François Mauriac, Marcel Aymé, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jean-Paul Dubois, and Joël Egloff. With his theater company Théâtre88, he has staged both his own works and adaptations of Shakespeare in a various theater festivals in Iran, France, and Germany.
Emil Marat, Poland
(in residence from 13 April to 31 May)
The Polish journalist and writer Emil Marat was born in 1971. He graduated with a degree in philosophy from the University of Warsaw and is the author of award-winning history books. Made in Poland (Wielka Litera, 2014) is an extended interview with a legendary soldier of the Polish underground during the WWII living in Paris, Stanislas Likiernik; the book was awarded a prize by the largest Polish weekly magazine Polityka in 2015. Sen Kolumba (W.A.B., 2018), a literary reportage, was nominated for the Polish Nike literary award in 2019. His recent historical novel, Studnie Norymbergi (Wielka Litera, 2021), surveys the origins of evil, the Holocaust and the desire for revenge.
Lucie Modde, France
(in residence from 26 April to 25 May)
Lucie Modde was born in 1988 in Nantes, France. A French translator who works from Chinese and English, she is also a reader for several publishers. Following the approach promoted by the association ATLAS, which strives to foster literary translation, she has recently begun to deepen her experience in running translation workshops. She has published a number of literary translations in French, including Tout ça va changer by Lao Ma (Picquier, 2015), Les âmes des enfants endormis (Denoël, 2017; from Mia Yun’s novel House of the Winds), Encore plus loin que Pluton by Huang Chong-kai (L’Asiathèque, 2018), Chinese Queer by Seven (Sarbacane, 2020), and L’hôtel du cygne by Zhang Yueran (Zulma, 2021).
Mariana Dimópulos, Argentina / Germany
(in residence from 28 April to 9 June)
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1973, Mariana Dimópulos is a writer and literary translator. She teaches translation theory at the University of Buenos Aires. Currently, she is the recipient of a grant from the University of Bonn, Germany. She has published four novels – recently All My Goodbyes (2017) and Imminence (2019) at Giromundo – and a critical study on the German author Walter Benjamin. She has translated into Spanish several German- and English-language authors, including Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, and J.M. Coetzee.
Axel Malik, Germany
(in residence from 9 to 25 May)
Axel Malik was born 1953 in Jugenheim, Germany, and lives and works in Berlin. He is an artist in the field of writing and his daily writing project, The Scriptal Method, has continued uninterrupted since it began in April 1989. Later on it expanded into additional forms. His work, composed of graphic signs, has been the subject of exhibitions, installations in libraries and of the bilingual book Bibliothek der unlesbaren Zeichen / Library of Unreadable Signs (Wolff Verlag, 2018).
Taras Grescoe, Canada
(in residence from 16 May to 28 June)
Taras Grescoe is the award-winning author of seven non-fiction books, among them the best-selling The Devil’s Picnic (2005), Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood (2008), Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile (2012), and Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World (2016) at HarperCollins and MacMillan. His books have been published in a half-dozen languages. He’s a contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, The New Yorker, The Smithsonian, and many other magazines and newspapers. Born in Toronto in 1966, raised in Vancouver and Calgary, he now lives in Montreal.
Pierre Fankhauser, Switzerland
(in residence from 1 to 29 June)
Born in Lausanne in 1975, the Swiss writer and translator Pierre Fankhauser earned a degree in literature and the social sciences. He worked for several years as a teacher and cultural journalist at L’Hebdo, before settling in Buenos Aires to write for what would be a seven-year stint. He has published two novels at BSN Press, Sirius (2014) and Bergstamm (2019) on the real-life figure of his fellow Swiss writer Jacques Chessex. Fankhauser’s poetry collection La visée was awarded the 2018 Prix Tirage limité. He is also the host of literary events for Tulalu !?, publishes the review Arkhaï, and teaches at the Institut littéraire suisse of Biel/Bienne.
Guy Bennett, United States
(in residence from 1 to 30 June)
Guy Bennett, born in 1960 in Los Angeles, is an American writer and translator from French. He had a career in music for some twenty years and works for two publishing houses, Mindmade Books and Otis Books. Since 1999, he has also been a teacher at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He has published some ten collections of poetry, a number of nonpoetic works, and many translations, including Last Words (Sun & Moon Press, 1998), The Row (Seeing Eye Books, 2000), Drive to Cluster, in collaboration with the painter Ron Griffin (ML & NLF, 2003), 32 Snapshots of Marseilles (Sacrifice Press, 2010), and Self-Evident Poems (Otis Books / Seismicity Editions, 2011).
Julien Burri, Switzerland
(in residence from 7 to 22 June)
Born in Lausanne in 1980, the Swiss writer Julien Burri is also a research fellow in literature at the University of Lausanne and a journalist at the Swiss daily Le Temps. He has published several novels, including Poupée (2009), Muscles & La maison (2014), and Prendre l’eau (2017), at Bernard Campiche Éditeur; and Roches tendres (Éditions d’autre part, 2021). He began publishing poetry in 1997; his collections include the artist’s books Ice & Cream (art&fiction, 2014) and Lacunes (BSN Press, 2019), with watercolors by Florence Grivel. He was awarded the Prix de littérature de la Fondation vaudoise pour la culture in 2011.
Hari Kunzru, United States
(in residence from 6 to 22 June)
Born in 1969 in London, Hari Kunzru is the author of several novels, including My Revolutions (Penguin Books, 2007), Gods Without Men (Penguin Books, 2011), White Tears (Knopf, 2017), and Red Pill (Knopf, 2021), translated in more than twenty languages. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches in the creative writing program at New York University. He lives in New York.
Laura Ortiz Gómez, Colombia / Argentina
(in residence from 16 June to 28 July)
Laura Ortiz Gómez, born in 1986 in Bogota, Colombia, studied literature at Javeriana University. She worked as a literacy mediator in public libraries in rural Colombia. She holds a Master’s degree in creative writing from UNTREF (Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero) in Argentina. She was awarded the Scholarship for Colombians in the Process of Artistic Training, from the Ministry of Culture of Colombia, and won the Antonio Di Benedetto Scholarship which involves a residency for writers. She won the Elisa Mújica National Narrative Award for her book Sofoco, a collection of tales published by Laguna Libros, 2021.
Khatuna Tskhadadze, Georgia
(in residence from 30 June to 28 July)
Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1973, Khatuna Tskhadadze is a literary translator. A graduate of Tbilisi State University in 1998 with a degree in philology, she completed specialization courses in Venice, Rome, Milan, Siena, and Perugia. Currently she is teaching literature at Guivy Zaldastanishvili American Academy in Tbilisi and contemporary Italian literature at Tbilisi State University. She has translated into Georgian several Italian writers such as Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Tonino Guerra. She also contributes regularly to online and print magazines and newspapers, writing book reviews and articles.
Halyna (Haska) Shyyan, Ukraine
(in residence from 29 June to 28 July)
Born in 1980 in Lviv, Haska Shyyan is an Ukrainian prose and poetry author, also a translator and a cultural programmer. She studied classical philology and has translated into Ukrainian the DBC Pierre novel Lights out in Wonderland. She is the author of two novels and was the first Ukrainian writer to win the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019. She regularly contributes to different magazines. She is also a curator of the special program for the Lviv Book Forum.
María Negroni, Argentina
(in residence from 30 June to 28 July)
María Negroni, born 1951 in Rosario, is an Argentinian novelist, poet, essayist and translator. In her thirties she moved into New York City to pursue a PhD in Latin American literature at Columbia University. She then taught for more than a decade at Sarah Lawrence College. She returned to Argentina in 2014 and created the first Master in creative writing to exist in the country and teaches at UNTREF (Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero). She has published numerous books, including in English Night Journey (Princeton University Press, 2002) and Berlin Interlude (Black Square, 2021), and received many awards.
Sonali Prasad, India
(in residence from 5 July to 31 August)
Sonali Prasad has graduated from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism with a Master of Science in Journalism and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has reported on science, environment issues and climate change for publications such as The Guardian, Washington Post, Quartz, Mongabay, and Hakai Magazine. She also explores interconnections between the human and nonhuman using creative media practices and pushing the boundaries of storytelling. She has worked across poetry, data, video, installation art, and participatory mixed media.
http://www.sonaliprasad.net/about
Rafael-José Díaz, Spain
(in residence from 5 July to 2 August)
The poet, translator, and professor of Spanish language and literature Rafael-José Díaz was born in 1971 in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain. From 1993 to 1995, he managed the review Paradiso. He has published collections of poems, short stories, selections from his diary, and numerous translations into Spanish, in particular of the French-speaking Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet. Three of his works have been brought out in French, Le crépitement (L’Escampette, 2007), Un suaire (L’Harmattan, 2021), and Demeurer suspendu (Cheyne, 2021).
Isabel Garcia Gomez, France
(in residence from 26 July to 22 August)
Isabel Garcia Gomez was born in 1978 and grew up on the Franco-Swiss border. She lives and works in Geneva as a conservator-restorer at the Musée d’ethnographie. She is the author of Le soclage dans l’exposition : en attendant la lévitation des objets (OCIM, 2011) and a regular contributor to a range of professional publications. Several of her short stories have been published in the review La Cinquième Saison and in anthologies brought out by Cherche-Midi, Plaisir de Lire, and Au Diable Vauvert. She is the recipient of the 2021 Prix Studer/Ganz.
Safya Bakhtyari, Iran
(in residence from 9 August to 12 September)
Safya Bakhtyari, originally from Afghanistan, was born in 1995 in Mashhad, Iran, where she now lives. She graduated from Semnan University of Arts with a degree in Visual Communication. She is currently a freelance illustrator and recently won the title of Selected Artist in the French Embassy Talent Competition. An exhibition of illustrations selected for this competition is now underway.
https://5ea773693921c.site123.me/
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Kenya
(in residence from 25 August to 28 September)
The Kenyan-born writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor obtained a Master of Philosophy and Creative Writing from the University of Queensland, Brisbane. She is the author of the well-received Dust (Knopf, 2014), in which family secrets reveal the wounds of Kenyan history, and Dragonfly Sea (Knopf, 2019). Her stories and essays have appeared in a range of literary magazines, including McSweeney’s and Granta. For her contributions to the arts, she was awarded the 2016 Head of State Commendation (Kenya). She is working on a new novel tentatively titled The Long Decay.
Florin Irimia, Romania
(in residence from 4 August to 27 September)
Born in 1976, Florin Irimia is a Romanian writer. He has published three novels, Defekt (Brumar, 2011), O fereastră întunecată (Polirom, 2012), Câteva lucruri despre tine (Polirom, 2014), and two volumes of interlinked short-stories about memory and trauma, Misterul mașinuțelor chinezești (Polirom, 2017) and Bărbatul din spatele ceții (Polirom, 2021). He lives in Iași, Romania, where he teaches English and North American literature at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University.
Amélie Mouton, Belgium
(in residence from 3 August to 6 September)
Born in 1978, the Belgian journalist Amélie Mouton contributes to a number of publications, including La Libre Belgique and Jeune Afrique. Spurred by a fondness for literary journalism and long formats, as well as a deeply felt concern for the ecological crisis the world is facing, she has done a number of in-depth reportages, covering, for example, desertification in Turkey, the Fukushima disaster, and the return of whales to the waters off New York City. She is currently writing a nonfiction literary narrative on oil and global warming in the Arabo-Persian Gulf.
Katarzyna Boni, Poland
(in residence from 3 August to 13 September)
Katarzyna Boni, born in 1982, is a Polish writer and reporter. She graduated in cultural studies at the University of Warsaw as well as from the Polska Szkoła Reportażu (Polish School of Reportage). She specializes in writing about Asia, where she spent over seven years working in Japan, China, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. She is a co-author of Kontener – a book about Syrian refugees in Jordan, written together with Wojciech Tochman (Agora, 2014) – and she is the author of Ganbare!: Workshops on Dying (Open Letter, 2021) on loss and grief in post-tsunami Japan. She also writes for different Polish magazines, mainly about the climate crisis.
Menno Schilthuizen, The Netherlands
(in residence from 7 September to 5 October)
Menno Schilthuizen, born in 1965, is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist. He holds a position as senior scientist at Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, the Netherlands, and as professor for evolution and biodiversity at Leiden University. In addition, he is an active popularizer of science, focusing on understanding the evolution and ecology of urban nature. His recent book Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution (Quercus, 2018) has been published in thirteen languages and helped to create worldwide enthusiasm and appreciation for urban nature.
Toine Heijmans, The Netherlands
(in residence from 16 September to 13 October)
The Dutch writer and journalist Toine Heijmans was born in 1969. He lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied history, and he is a columnist for the Dutch daily newspaper De Volkskrant. He has published several books of non-fiction and three widely translated novels, and has been awarded a number of prizes, including the Prix Médicis étranger in France for En mer (Christian Bourgois, 2013), and is currently a candidate for the Euregio Literature Prize for Pristina. His latest novel, Zuurstofschuld (Uitgeverij Plum, 2021) is being translated into French, Italian, German and Spanish.
Philippe Gerin, France
(in residence from 8 September to 6 October)
Philippe Gerin was born in Saint-Étienne, France, and lives and works in Brittany. He finished his first novel, Du haut de la décharge sauvage (LNA, 2013), during a yearlong sabbatical on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and has just published his third book, La mélancolie des baleines (Gaïa, 2021). Through the journeys of lame yet radiant characters, he explores such themes as attachment, the painful reality of being wrenched from others or from certain places, and the impermanence of the world.
Odai Al Zoubi, Syria / Sweden
(in residence from 11 October to 8 November)
Odai Al Zoubi, born in 1981 in Damascus, is a Syrian writer, translator, and journalist who lives and works in Malmo, Sweden. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He has published several collections of short stories in Arabic at Al-Mutawassit Publications. He has translated works by Bertrand Russell from English into Arabic. He also writes for the Syrian culture website Al-Jumhuriya.
Dana von Suffrin, Germany
(in residence from 5 October to 2 November)
Born in 1985 in Munich, Germany, Dana von Suffrin studied history, literature, and political science in Munich, Jerusalem, and Naples. She earned a PhD in the History of Science. Her first novel Otto, published in 2019 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, about a dysfunctional German-Jewish family, won several awards. Since 2019, she has published short stories, essays, and a radio play.
Noëlle Revaz, Switzerland
(in residence from 19 October to 9 December)
The Swiss writer Noëlle Revaz was born in Valais in 1968. After taking a degree in literature, she began her career as a regular contributor to the radio before going on to publish short stories, radio and stage plays, and three novels. Rapport aux bêtes (Gallimard, 2002), which was awarded the Prix Schiller and the Prix Lettres frontière, has been adapted for both the stage and film, while Efina (Gallimard, 2009) garnered the 2010 Prix Michel Dentan, and L’infini livre (Zoé, 2014) took the Prix suisse de littérature in 2015. She also regularly performs onstage as part of the duo Nomi Nomi, and has taught at the Institut littéraire of Biel/Bienne since 2007.
Alicja Rosé, Poland
(in residence from 20 October to 14 December)
Alicja Rosé is a Polish poet, illustrator, and translator. She translates poems and essays from English, Spanish, Italian, French and Norwegian. For her illustrations of Magdalena Tulli’s book Ten i tamten las (Wilk & Król Oficyna Wydawnicz, 2017), she received the Literary Warsaw Award and was nominated for the International IBBY Award. Her illustrated volume of poems Północ. Przypowieści (Znak, 2019, with a blurb by Adam Zagajewski) had its premiere at the Miłosz Festival 2019. She has published in Kultura Liberalna, Zeszyty Literackie, Wiersze w metrze, Gazeta Wyborcza, Lighthouse Journal, Carteggi Letterari, Twórczość, Więź, Czas Literatury and Dekada.
Katya Apekina, United States
(in residence from 21 September to 13 October)
Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter and translator. Her novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish (Two Dollar Radio, 2018), was named a Best Book of 2018 and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction. It has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Catalan, and Italian. She translated poetry and prose from Russian for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), which was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Born in Moscow, Russia, she currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Clara Chotil, France / Brazil
(in residence from 15 November to 14 December)
The Franco-Brazilian architect and visual artist Clara Chotil was born in 1992. She cofounded Dynamorphe in 2017, where she designs light architectural structures. Turning to stage design and the graphic arts, she began developing screening and live drawing devices, notably as part of the theater company F71 with the shows Noire and Songbook. A graduate of the École européenne supérieure de l’image in 2021 with the project Ópera Negra, she is currently taking part in the Invisible Lines program, a comics and graphic novel residency between France, Italy, and the Czech Republic.
Tsering Yangzom Lama, Nepal / Canada
(in residence from 1 November to 14 December)
Born in 1984 in Kathmandu, Nepal, Tsering Yangzom Lama is a Tibetan writer and activist. She moved to Canada at the age of twelve. She has a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, where she was a TOM fellow, writing fellow, and teaching fellow. Her debut novel, We Measure the Earth with our Bodies, will be published in the United States by Bloomsbury and in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 2022. She is also an environmentalist and human rights advocate, and is currently serving as a storytelling advisor for Greenpeace International.
Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, Sudan
(in residence from 1 to 29 November)
The author Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, born in 1963 in Sudan, has written some fifteen books, novels and short story collections in Arabic, which have been published around the world. His work is uncompromising in its view of the civil war and dictatorship in Sudan and was banned by the authorities in 2009, while his novel on the Jungo, seasonal workers with a cheeky brazen sense of freedom, “well-behaved in the dry season, crazy in the rainy season,” was awarded the prestigious Al-Tayeb Salih Prize for Creative Writing. Persecuted and imprisoned, he chose exile, settling first in Austria and later in France, where he lives today. Several of his works are available in English translation, The Jungo: Stakes of the Earth (Africa World Press/The Red Sea Press, 2015), “The Butcher’s Daughter” in an anthology of short stories titled The Book of Khartoum (Comma Press, 2016), and Birth (Willows House, 2020).
Photos © D.R
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