Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and their daughter Ariadna (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; her husband was executed. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Russian and American poet and essayist.
Rose Ausländer was a Jewish poet writing in German and English. Born in Czernowitz in the Bukovina, she lived through its tumultuous history of belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kingdom of Romania, and eventually the Soviet Union. Rose Ausländer spent her life in several countries: Austria-Hungary, Romania, the United States, and Germany.
Erich Fried was an Austrian-born poet, writer, and translator. He initially became known to a broader public in both Germany and Austria for his political poetry, and later for his love poems. As a writer, he mostly wrote plays and short novels. He also translated works by different English writers from English into German, most notably works by William Shakespeare.
Ahmad Shamlou was an Iranian poet, writer, and journalist. Shamlou was arguably the most influential poet of modern Iran. His initial poetry was influenced by and in the tradition of Nima Youshij. In fact, Abdolali Dastgheib, Iranian literary critic, argues that Shamlou is one of the pioneers of modern Persian poetry and has had the greatest influence, after Nima, on Iranian poets of his era. Shamlou's poetry is complex, yet his imagery, which contributes significantly to the intensity of his poems, is accessible. As the base, he uses the traditional imagery familiar to his Iranian audience through the works of Persian masters like Hafez and Omar Khayyám. For infrastructure and impact, he uses a kind of everyday imagery in which personified oxymoronic elements are spiked with an unreal combination of the abstract and the concrete thus far unprecedented in Persian poetry, which distressed some of the admirers of more traditional poetry.
Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet and playwright, who also edits, broadcasts, lectures and translates from Welsh into English. She co-founded Tŷ Newydd, a writers' centre in North Wales.
Louise Bogan was an American poet. She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945, and was the first woman to hold this title. Throughout her life she wrote poetry, fiction, and criticism, and became the regular poetry reviewer for The New Yorker.
Cvetka Lipuš is an Austrian poet writing in Slovenian.
Alexander Lernet-Holenia was an Austrian poet, novelist, dramaturgist and writer of screenplays and historical studies who produced a heterogeneous literary opus that included poetry, psychological novels describing the intrusion of otherworldly or unreal experiences into reality, and recreational films.
Waidhofen an der Ybbs is a statutory city (Statutarstadt) in the Austrian state of Lower Austria. The city had a population of 11,662 as of the 2001 census. It was first mentioned in 1186 and has been the economic centre of the Ybbstal valley since the 14th century.
Ingibjörg Haraldsdóttir was an Icelandic poet and translator. She lived in Cuba from 1970 to 1975 and also lived in the U.S.S.R. for a time. She has had six books of poetry published. In translations she is most known for her work translating Russian and Spanish works. She was born in Reykjavík. In 2002, she was awarded the Icelandic Literary Prize.
Amira Hess is an Israeli poet and artist. Arriving in Israel in 1951, she first lived in an immigrant transit camp, then moved to Jerusalem, where she still lives today. Her first book, And the Moon is Dripping Madness, was awarded the Luria Prize. Her other volumes of poetry in Hebrew include Two Horses by the Light Line, The Information Eater, Yovel, and There is no Real Woman in Israel. Some individual poems have been translated into English, French, German, Greek, Spanish and Russian. A collection of about seventy poems under the title Between Boulders of Basalt and Foundation, was translated into English by Shay K. Azoulay. Hess has 13 published poetry books to date. She was twice awarded the Prime Ministers prize for poetry, the Yehuda Amichai Award, as well as the Kugel & AHI Award for poetry.
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings is an American New Formalist and Philhellene poet and translator. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.
Samina Raja was a Pakistani Urdu poet, writer, editor, translator, educationist and broadcaster. She lived in Islamabad, Pakistan, and worked in the National Language Authority as a subject specialist.
Liudmyla Skyrda is a well-known Ukrainian poet, scholar, literary critic, specialist in literature, culture expert, translator.
Margaret Diesendorf née Máté, (1912–1993), was an Australian linguist, poet, editor, translator and educationist. Born in Vienna, Austria, Diesendorf migrated to Australia in 1939. She published two books of poetry, made numerous translations of other people's works, and with Grace Perry, edited Poetry Australia.
Lindita Arapi is an Albanian writer and journalist. She is cited as a noteworthy example of a generation of female Albanian writers. Together with her contemporaries, Ervin Hatibi, Agron Tufa, and Rudian Zekthi, Arapi is one of Albania's present-day literary avant-garde writers. She has been living in Germany since the late 1990s, where she has published several volumes of poetry. Her first book of poetry, Am Meer, nachts was the first book of poetry written by a female Albanian poet in German. Her first novel, Vajzat me çelës në qafë (2010), translated into German in 2012, was awarded a Book of the Year prize in Albania.
Julia Hartwig-Międzyrzecka was a Polish writer, poet and translator, considered to be one of Poland's most important poets.
Jean Starr Untermeyer was an American poet, translator, and educator. She was the author of six volumes of poetry and a memoir. She was married to the poet Louis Untermeyer.
Karen Leeder (1962) is a writer, translator and leading British scholar of German culture. She is professor of Modern German Literature in the University of Oxford and was from 2015 to 2017 Associate Head of the Humanities Division, University of Oxford. In 2017 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and in 2020 she was elected to the Academia Europaea. In 2021 she was elected as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature, a position she will take up at The Queen's College, Oxford in 2022.
