Notes on Contributors
Timothy Adès is a rhyming translator-poet working from French, German, Spanish and (rarely) Greek. He has awards for versions of Jean Cassou, Robert Desnos, Victor Hugo, and Alfonso Reyes; other favourite poets are Brecht, Sikelianós and Ricarda Huch. He runs an occasional bookstall of translated poetry. His newest books are: Florentino and the Devil, by Alberto Arvelo Torrealba (Venezuela); Loving by Will, our national Bard’s 154 amorous talismans put into lipograms without avoiding A,I, O, or U; and Robert Desnos’s, Surrealist, Lover, Resistant. In all three books, his text faces the original.
Houman Barekat is a book critic based in London. His reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator, Literary Review, the Irish Times and elsewhere. He is coeditor (with Robert Barry and David Winters) of The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online, forthcoming from O/R Books.
Soumya Bhattacharya is the editor of Hindustan Times, Mumbai. He is the author of five books of fiction, non-fiction and memoir.
Sagari Chhabra is a poet ( The Professional Woman’s Dreams), playwright ( The Gift) and an award-winning film-director ( Now, I will Speak, True Freedom, Tatva and others). She has written and directed fifteen films which have won five awards. Her latest book, In Search Of Freedom (Harper Collins 2015) was awarded the National Laadli Media award. She lives in New Delhi.
Claire Crowther has written three collections of poetry. The first, Stretch of Closures (Shearsman 2007), was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Best First Collection prize. Her latest publication is Bare George (Shearsman, 2016), a chapbook written after a year’s residency in the Royal Mint Museum. Her poetry is recorded in the Poetry Archive.
Patrick James Errington is a poet and translator from the prairies of Alberta, Canada. Among others, his poems won The London Magazine Poetry Prize (2016), were commended in the National Poetry Competition (2017), and appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Best New Poets (2016), The Iowa Review, Copper Nickel, West Branch, The American Literary Review, Cider Press Review, Diagram, and Horsethief. His French translation (with Laure Gall) of PJ Harvey’s The Hollow of the Hand was released by Éditions l’Âge d’Homme in 2017.
Shaun Fynn is an acclaimed designer with over 20 years experience in advising and creating for Fortune 500 companies. Since founding STUDIOFYNN in 1997 he has developed the practice in the US, Italy and emerging markets working in the areas of design, design research, photo documentary and design education. He is also a visiting lecturer at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, the IIT in Mumbai, India, Art Center College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan.
Isabel Galleymore’s first pamphlet is Dazzle Ship (Worple Press). In 2016 she won the Basil Bunting Prize and the Jane Martin Poetry Prize. Her work has featured in Poetry, Poetry London and Poetry Review. She is currently undertaking a residency in the Peruvian Amazon.
Josh Gluckstein had a traditional artistic education at Hampstead Fine Arts College and studied painting at Brighton University. His practice is rooted in figurative painting, with an adventurous style that is recognised through scale, colour and expressive mark making. Following a year of independent travel, India captured Gluckstein’s imagination and inspired him to create a body of work to reflect his experiences. Before travelling through the country, Gluckstein volunteered with children in the slums of Rajasthan for 7 weeks - an intense, eye-opening and challenging experience. Understanding the culture and traditions of the individuals brought him closer to his subjects. Through Faces of India, predominantly a collection of portraiture, Gluckstein aims to encapsulate the subtle emotions of the subjects, while allowing his audience to experience the colours, vibrancy and energy of India. https://www. joshgluckstein.com/
Henry Hurst is an archaeologist with a special interest in ancient cities and a retired Reader in Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University. He is currently involved with the publication of research he has carried out at Rome, Carthage and Gloucester.
Tabish Khair was born and educated up to his MA in a small town of India. He went on to work as a journalist in Delhi and is currently an associate professor at Aarhus and a Leverhulme guest professor at Leeds. Winner of the All India Poetry Prize, his novels have been shortlisted for various awards, including the Man Asian and the DSC Prize for South Asia. In 2016, he published his fifth novel, Just Another Jihadi Jane, to critical acclaim in UK and elsewhere.
Charanpreet Khaira works at the Wylie Agency in Bloomsbury and writes freelance reviews and short fiction in her spare time. After spending three years studying English literature at Oxford, she never leaves the house without a book in her bag.
Pratik Khanjilal is editor at the Indian Express and a writer/ translator.
Andrew Lambirth is a writer about art who also writes poetry and makes collages. Besides contributing to a range of publications including The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian and RA
Magazine, he was art critic for The Spectator from 2002 until 2014, and has collected his reviews in a paperback entitled A is a Critic. Among his recent books are monographs on the artists David Inshaw, Eileen Gray and William Gear. He lives in Suffolk surrounded by pictures.
Alastair Llewelyn-Smith, a former actor, is sixty four, and buys and sell wine for a living. He is married, with four adult children and an equal number of grandchildren. He has been writing poems all his life. He’s also written five (unpublished) novels since 1998, but returned full-time to poetry at the beginning of 2016. His poem ‘Vertigo’ was published in Acumen, January 2017. He’s currently working on his first and second collections of poems: the latter comprises reflections on the conflict in Syria/Iraq, where he grew up.
Teresa Monachino studied at the Chelsea School of Art and is a Graphic Designer. While Teresa’s work covers many design disciplines, from branding and advertising to publishing, she is best known for her typographic style and love of words. She is the author and designer of Words Fail Me published by Phaidon, now a regular feature in Private Eye magazine. Her follow-up book Around the World with the Bodoni Family is a witty A-Z exploration of the typeface. Teresa has won many design awards including two D&AD and has featured widely in the design press. She is a visiting lecturer and recently gave a TED talk in Washington DC concerning the perils of bad communication within the health sector; An A-Z Sicktionary. Teresa has collaborated with, among others, artist Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, graphic design giant Alan Fletcher and actor Sir Sean Connery while her clients have included the BBC, Design Museum, UK Government and Tate Galleries as well as many publishing houses worldwide.
Anne O’Brien left her job in the European Commission in Brussels to pursue her passion for creative writing. Since then, she has gained a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and is currently working towards her PhD. In 2016, she won the Bath Short Story Award and came second in the London Magazine Short Story Competition. Her short stories have also been shortlisted/placed in many competitions including the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story competition, the Bridport Prize, BBC’s Opening Lines and the Fish Short Story Prize. Anne’s work has appeared in several anthologies and magazines and has been translated and published in Vietnamese.
Fiona Sampson MBE is a poet and writer, published in thirty-seven languages, who has received international prizes in the US, India, Macedonia and Bosnia. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she’s published twenty-seven books, received the Newdigate Prize, a Cholmondeley Award and numerous awards from the Arts Councils of England and Wales, the Society of Authors and Poetry Book Society, and twice been shortlisted for both T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Her new books are Lyric Cousins: musical form in poetry (EUP), the poetry collection The Catch (Penguin) (both 2016) and Limestone Country (Little Toller, May 2017)
Navtej Sarna is a diplomat and author. He graduated from Delhi University in 1980 with degrees in Law and Commerce and joined the Indian Foreign Service the same year. He has served in various diplomatic capacities in Moscow, Poland, Bhutan, Geneva, Iran and Washington . His recent appointments were as the Foreign Office Spokesman and India’s Ambas-
Raoul Schrott born 1965, is a prominent and prolific Austrian poet, translator, critic and broadcaster. A book of his poems in English translation is being prepared by Iain Galbraith, who kindly made this version easier to write.
Sudeep Sen’s prize-winning books include Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award), The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions) and EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House). His words appear in the TLS, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, FT and broadcast onBBC, PBS, CNN, IBN and NDTV. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Indian Love Poems (Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), and Oxford New Writing (Blackwell). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS and the editor of Atlas. Sen is the first Asian honoured to speak and read at the Nobel Laureate Week. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature.”
Will Stone is a poet, essayist and literary translator. Shearsman Books have recently reissued his poetry collections in new editions and published his third The Sleepwalkers in March 2016. His translations with Arc, Menard and Hesperus include works by Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Trakl, Rilke, Nerval and Roth. Pushkin Press published his Stefan Zweig Montaigne in August 2015 and Zweig’s 1930’s essays as Messages from a Lost World in January 2016. His Selected Poems of Georges Rodenbach will be published by Arc in 2017 and an expanded collection of the poetry of Georg Trakl by Seagull Books in 2017. Will also contributes to Poetry Review, The TLS and Apollo magazine.
George Tardios was born in London of Greek Cypriot parentage. Poems in six ‘PEN/Arts Council anthologies’ published by Hutchinson and several other publications. Two collections of poems BullSong and Buttoned-Up Shapes. Director of Totleigh Barton, the Arvon Foundation’s first residential creative writing centre in Devon. ‘Poets in Schools’ scheme and tutored creative writing courses for Arvon Foundation. Organised the first ‘National Poetry Competition’ for the Poetry Society/BBC TV at Earl’s Court and for Arvon Foundation/Observer. Judged television’s BBC2 ‘South Bank Show’ Poetry Competition. Led an expedition in Tanzania retracing, on foot, H.M. Stanley’s 1871 journey in his search for Dr David Livingstone. The trek took two years and twelve days to complete. George Tardios has written an account of the journey, Lay down your heart.
Andre van Loon is a writer and literary critic. He was born in the Netherlands and grew up there and in Scotland, before moving to the bright lights of London. He has written short stories for Litro, The View from Here, Crème de la Crème: The Best of CSYS Creative Writing 1991-2001 (Canongate: 2001) and Unthology 8 (Unthank Books: 2016). He writes literary criticism - mainly about British and American novels and books about Russian history, politics and literature - for The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Tablet, The Cambridge Quarterly and others. He is writing his first novel - a story of unhappy love - and is very happy about that.
Robert Wrigley has published eleven books of poems, including most recently Box (Penguin, 2017), and in the United Kingdom, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2013). He is a distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho and lives in the woods, near Moscow, Idaho, in the northern Rocky Mountains, with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes. sador to Israel. Presently he is serving as a Secretary to Government of India in the Ministry of External Affairs. He is the author of the novels We Weren’t Lovers Like That (Penguin India, 2003) and The Exile( Penguin India, 2008) as well as the short story collection Winter Evenings (Rainlight Rupa, 2012). His non-fiction works are The Book of Nanak (Penguin India, 2003), Folktales of Poland (Sterling 1991) and Indians at Herod’s Gate (Rainlight Rupa, 2014). He has translated Guru Gobind Singh’s Zafarnama (Penguin India 2011) from Persian to English as well as the Punjabi partition stories of Mohinder Singh Sarna in Savage Harvest (Rupa, 2013). He has been contributing regularly to journals and newspapers in India and abroad including the Times Literary Supplement, London Magazine, The Hindu, India Today, Outlook and so on. His literary column ‘Second Thoughts’ that appeared in The Hindu for seven years is being brought out as a collection by Harper Collins.