South meets North

The participants of the workshop:

Simone INGUANEZ (Malta) was born in 1971, she graduated in law from the University of Malta and fosters an interest in human sciences, language and art. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Water, Fire, Earth, and I (Transl. Maria GRECH-GANADO, Inizjamed, Midsea Books Ltd, 2005) and Ftit Mara Ftit Tifla ‘Part Woman Part Child’ (Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2005). Her work has been published in several anthologies, aired on radio and TV and set to music. She has been translated into English, Italian, French, Hungarian, Russian and Finnish. This year, Inguanez is invited to the Hungarian Europoetica Festival to be held in Budapest in April. Last year, she was Malta’s writer in residence for the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, courtesy of the US Embassy in Malta.

Gokçenur Ç. (Turkey) was born in Istanbul in 1971 and spent his childhood in a number of Turkish cities. He graduated Istanbul Technical Univercity Electrical Engineering Faculty and has a Master's degree in Business Administration from Istanbul University. He started publishing his poems in Turkish magazines since 1990 and his first collection Handbook of Every Book came out in 2006. He has translated Wallace Stevens, Paul Auster and a modern Japanese haiku anthology into Turkish, and is currently preparing an anthology of modern American poetry. He is a member of the editorial board of the literary magazine Ç.N. (initials for "translator's note in Turkish), dedicated to poetry in translation.

Tal Nitzan (Israel) is the poet, editor and one of the preeminent translators from Spanish in Israel today. She was born in Jaffa, has lived in Buenos Aires, Bogota & New York, currently lives in Tel Aviv. B.A in art history and Hispanic literature, M.A. in general and compared literature in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Recipient of the Women Writers’ Prize in 1998, and the Culture Minister Prize for Beginning Poets in 2001, Nitzan has published three poetry collections: Domestica (2002, recipient of the Culture Minister's Prize for First Book), An Ordinary Evening (2006), and Café Soleil Bleu (2007). Her forthcoming book, A Short History, has won the ACUM (artists & writers rights society) Prize for poetry submitted anonimously (2007). An ardent peace activist, Nitzan has organized several political-poetic events, and has edited the ground-breaking anthology With an Iron pen: Hebrew Protest Poetry 1984-2004 (2005), a collection of 99 Hebrew poems of the last 20 years that protest against the Israeli occupation (forthcoming publication of English version in SUNY Press, USA). Nitzan has translated over 50 books into Hebrew, mainly from Spanish, including two anthologies of Latin American poetry, and adapted a Hebrew version of Don Quixote for youth (2006), poetry works by Cervantes, Machado, Garcia Lorca, Neruda, Paz, Borges, Vallejo, Pizarnik & Hierro, and prose by García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Onetti, Delibes, Mendoza, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, Angela Carter and many others. She has won numerous awards for her translations, among them the Culture Minister Creation Prize for translators (1995, 2005), and in 2004, an honorary medal from Chile’s president, for her translation of Pablo Neruda’s poetry.

Kārlis Vērdiņš (Latvia) was born in 1979 in Riga. He is the poet, critic and translator. He graduated in cultural theory from the Latvian Academy of Culture. Since 2004, he has been working on his doctoral thesis in the field of literary history at the Latvian University. His book reviews and essays regularly appear in Latvian press. Vērdiņš has translated the works of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and other modern American poets. Vērdiņš is often described as one of the most mature and outstanding representatives of the youngest generation of poets. He has been a published poet since 1997 and is the author of two poetry collections – Ledlauži (The Icebreakers, 2001) and Biezpiens ar krējumu (Cottage Cheese with Cream, 2004). For several years he has worked as an editor for the Latvian Encyclopedia. Vērdiņš’ poetry has been translated into several languages and included in the anthology of young poets from Central and Eastern Europe A Fine Line (Arc Publications, 2004).