VICENTE AMEZTOY (1946-2001) is considered to be the most outstanding exponent of Basque surrealism.

AURELIA ARKOTXA is a Basque-French poet and member of the poetry collective Geopolitics and of IKER UMR 5478 of the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS) in Bayonne, an association for research on Basque culture, language and heritage. Currently she is researching the lives and manuscripts of Basque sailors in the sixteenth century.

BERNARDO ATXAGA, novelist, poet and playwright, writes both in Basque and Spanish and was born in Asteasu (Guipúzcoa).  He published his first book of poem Ziutateak (Las ciudades) in 1976, and two years later published Etiopía, for which he won the Critic’s Prize. Over twenty years, he has written literature for children and yound adults, plays, radio plays, and song lyrics.  In 1985 he won the Critic’s Prize with his novel Bi anai (Dos hermanos), and then again in 1988 with the novel Obabakoak (Los de Obaba), for which he also won both the Euskadi and National Literature Prizes. His latest novel Soinujolearen Semea (The Son of the Accordionist) was published in Basque (2003) and in Spanish (2004).

JOHN BERGER, novelist, painter, and art historian, was born in London in 1926. In 1952 Berger began writing for London’s New Statesman, and quickly became an influential Marxist art critic. Since then he has published a number of art books including the famous Ways of Seeing, which was turned into a television series by the BBC. Beginning with his first novel in 1958, Berger has also produced a significant body of fiction, including G. (1972), winner of England’s Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is also the author of screenplays and four plays for the stage. For the past twenty years Berger has lived in a small village in the French Alps. Fascinated by the traditions and endangered way of life of the mountain people, he has written about them both in his fiction and nonfiction.

ITXARO BORDA was born in Baiona/Bayonne (Basque Country) in 1959. She has degrees in Agriculture and History and works in the post office. She founded Maiatz, a literary journal (1982), together with Luzien Etxezaharreta. Her first book was published in 1984, Bizitza nola badoan (And So Life Goes, poetry). In 2002 she won the Euskadi Award with her novel 100% Basque, which has recently been published in French, translated by the author.

MARÍA ISABEL ALONSO BRETO holds a Ph.D. in English Philology from the University of Barcelona where she is currently a member of the Department of English and German Literatures. Her areas of interest include literary translation (especially women’s poetry written in English) and creative writing.

KELSEY CAMIRE first became drawn to translation after the death of Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, when she realized that, more than anything else, she wanted to be able to share Alberti’s poems with her father. She began translating while studying in Spain, focusing on the novel La lluvia amarilla by Julio Llamazares. She first met Julia Otxoa when the poet was visiting a Comparative Literature class at Smith College. Kelsey graduated from Smith College in 2001 and currently resides in Northampton, MA.

HARKAITZ CANO was born in Lasarte, Gipuzkoa in 1975 and currently resides in Donostia-San Sebastián. Cano’s highly diverse literary production has already become one of the cornerstones of the so-called “New Basque Literature.”  Author of a collection of poetry Kea behelainopean bezala (1994) at age 19, he has since published several collections of short stories and three novels:  Beluna Jazz (1996), Pasaia Blues (1999), and Paino gainean gosaltz (El puente desafinado – Baladas de Nueva York; 2000).

HUGO CLAUS was born in 1929 in Bruges (West-Flanders, Belgium).  As a young man, he worked on farms and as a seasonal laborer in sugar factories in Northern France while studying at the Academy of Ghent (Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten) and the Theatre Academy of Ghent (Toneelschool). His meeting with Antonin Artaud in 1948 stimulated his interest in experimental art.  From 1948 to 1951, he was a member of the modern painters’ movement COBRA, founded by Dutch painter Karel Appel.  In 1973, he married the soft-porn actress Slyvia Kristel (known for the 1970s Emmanuelle movies) with whom he has a son.  At various moments in his career, he lived in France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium.  Claus is a prolific painter, poet, dramatist, fiction writer, translator, and theatre and movie director.  Among his most famous novels are: De Verwondering (1962; L’étonnement), a story about Flemish Nazis during the WWII occupation and Het Verdriet van Belgi (1983; Le Chagrin des belges; The Sorrow of Belgium). He has received numerous national and international awards and several Nobel Prize nominations.

MARGARET JULL COSTA has translated works by Eca de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa and José Regio, Carmen Martí Gaite, Bernardo Atxaga, Javier Marías, among others. Her version of José Saramago’s All the Names won the 2000 Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet made her a joint winner of the Portuguese translation prize.

JUSTIN CRUMBAUGH is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Mount Holyoke College, where he specializes in Spanish and Basque cultural studies, particularly in relation to cinema, literature, social history, and economic development. He is currently preparing a book-length manuscript on the role of tourism in contemporary Spanish culture.

SUSAN M. DIGIACOMO is a cultural anthropologist who received her Ph.D. in anthropology in 1985 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She translates Catalan anthropology into English and American anthropology into Catalan, and is currently at work on an edited volume that approaches translation as an ethnographic practice. Having taught at several colleges and universities in the US, she now works in Barcelona at the Fundació Sant Joan de Déu as a medical editor/translator, and is an occasional visiting professor in the medical anthropology doctoral program at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona. 

Born in 1952, NUALA NI DHOMHNAILL grew up in the Irish-speaking areas of Kerry and Tipperary.  She has published three collections of poems in Irish, An Deaolg Droighin (1981), Féar Suaithinseach (1984), and Feis (1991). She has published two bilingual collections with Wake Forest University Press: Pharoah’s Daughter, with translations by thirteen of Ireland’s leading writers, and The Astrakhan Cloak, translated by Paul Muldoon. She was the 2002-2003 Nielson Professor at Smith College as well as a fellow at Louise W. and Edmund J. Kahn Liberal Arts Institute.

Bosnian poet FERIDA DURAKOVIC has published five collections of poems and two children’s books in her native Serbo-Croatian, and her work has been translated into Greek, Slovenian, Turkish, German, and Finnish. In 1998 White Pine Press brought out Heart of Darkness, her first collection to appear in English, translated by Amela Simic and Zoran Mutic.

Award-winning Welsh poet and playwright, MENNA ELFYN is the author of seven volumes of poetry, six stage plays, two novel for teenagers and editor of a number of educational books.  Her work has been translated into fifteen languages.  A Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, she was also made Poet Laureate for Children in 2002. She was shortlisted in 2003 for the Evelyn Encelot European Prize for Women Poets.

MAITE GONZALEZ ESNAL was born in San Sebastian in 1943.  She focuses her writing on children’s and young adult literature. Her most recent book is a collection of short stories entitled Maiderren taupada (Maider’s heartbeat), about the daily adverntures of Maider, a young girl.

AMAIA GABANTXO was born in the Basque country, where she grew up bilingual in Basque and Spanish. She moved to the UK at age 20, and in 1998, four years after her arrival, she began to write in English. She now lives in Norwich, where she combines teaching literature at the University of East Anglia with reviewing literature for the TLS and completing her doctorate.  Her work has been short-listed for the Asham Prize, won the Jury’s Commendation in the BCLA Literary Translation Competition 2000 and been published in several magazines and anthologies. She is currently translating a collection of short stories by contemporary Basque authors for the Basque Series project of the University of Nevada Press.

LUC GILLEMAN was born and raised in Ostend, a coastal town in the Flemish part of belgium.  After a brief stint as a radio-officer in the merchant marines, he studied Dutch and English philology at the University of Brussels, then worked free-lance for the Association du Patrimoine Artistique, translating books on Belgian art and architecture.  He moved to the United States in 1987 on a Belgian American Educational Fellowship and in 1995 obtained a Ph.D. in English from Indiana University, Bloomington.  In the same year, he joined Smith College where teaches in English and Comparative Literature.  His book John Osborne: Vituperative Artist was published by Routeldge in 2001.  He is currently translating poems by Hugo Claus and working on a book about the search for structure in modern plays.

ELIN AP HYWEL  (1962- ) is a poet, translator and editor who works in Welsh and English. She was the Royal Literary Fund’s first bilingual Fellow at the University of Wales in 2001/02 and has been reappointed for 2003/04. Her first volume of poems, Pethau Brau (Delicate Things) appeared in 1982, when she was studying Welsh and Modern Irish at the University of Wales. Her published work has been widely anthologized and translated into Czech, English, German, Italian and Japanese. She has edited two collections of Welsh women’s short stories in English. Her latest book, Ffinau/Borders (Gomer 2002), a volume of original poems and translations from the Welsh, is a collaboration with fellow poet Grahame Davies.

TERE IRASTORTZA began her career as a poet at a very young age, when she was still in college, studying Basque and Spanish philology. She has written six books: Gabeziak (1980), Hostoak. Gaia eta gau aldaketak (1983), Derrotaren fabulak (1986), Osinberdeko kantoreak (1986), Manual devotio gabecoa (1994), Gabeziaren khantoreak (Antología, 1995) and Izen gabe, direnak (2000).  She has also translated the work of many prominent writers into Basque. She is the president of the Association of Writers in the Basque Language (Euskal Idazleen Elkartea).

PHILIP JENKINS is a translator, writer and poet who lives in London. He translates contemporary Spanish poetry and prose and contributes to the Spanish Internet magazine Luke. With R.D.V. Glasgow he has translated Augusto Monterroso’s The Black Sheep and Other Fables, which is scheduled to appear in the United Kingdom in spring 2005. He has also been invited to prepare a bilingual selection of the poetry of Eli Tolaretxipi for publication in the UK in 2007.

EVA JUARROS-DAUSSÀ holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Smith College.

MIKEL LABOA, born in 1934 in Donostia, Gipuzkoa and by profession a medical doctor and psychiatrist, is nowadays considered, along with Benito Lertxundi, to be one of the most eminent singers of modern Basque music. He has had an enormous influence on contemporary youth.  In the 60s he was one of the founders of the legendary collective of Basque musicians,  Ez Dok Amairu (We Are Not Thirteen).

RYES LÁZARO is an aspiring translator and guest-editor of this issue.  She teaches Spanish language and contemporary literatures and cultures from the Iberian Peninsula at Smith College, where she came from her native Bilbao in 1979.   She likes to think that General Franco is partly responsible for this issue, for forcing her grandfather, Felipe Gurtubay, to bury his books in Basque as the dictator’s troops arrived at his hometown, Galdakao, and for forcing her to lose Euskera as a child of six in the early sixties here described by Atxaga.  Nunca mais.

MARIA-MERCÉ MARÇAL had several volumes of poetry to her credit when she died of cancer in 1998, at the age of 46.  She wrote a number of essays as well, a few stories, and a novel based on the biography and work of Pauline Mary Tarn, poet of American birth and French expression, known by her pen name, Renée Vivien.  One of Marçal’s early works is a collection of fifteen sestinas, in which she successfully uses the medieval form for modern preoccupations and imagery.

ANNABEL MARTIN was born in New Jersey in 1961, and spent her youth in Bilbao. A graduate of the University of Deusto in Bilbao, she earned her PhD in Spanish and Comparative Literature from North Carolina State University, and has since taught at North Carolina State and Emory College. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College.

KATHLEEN MCNERNEY is an eclectic scholar whose works include books on the fifteenth-century poet Ausias March and the novelist Joanot Martorell as well as works on contemporary Catalan women writers. She has also written about Spanish, French, and Latin-American authors, both classic and contemporary. She teaches literature, humanities, and women’s studies at West Virginia University. In 1990, she was awarded the Catalonia Prize for diffusion of Catalan culture, and in 1995 she was designated Benedum Distinguished Scholar by her institution.

MIREN AGUR MEABE, born in Lekeitio in 1962, she now lives in Bilbao. She has a degree in Basque philology. She was a teacher for a few years and now publishes Basque text books.  She writes poetry and children’s literature, and has to her credit many award winning books for children and young people including The House By the Cliff (2000, Eusakdi Prize). She has published two collections of poetry, Oi, hondarrezko emakaitz (1999) and Azalaren Kodea (2000), which received the Spanish Critics’ Prize on the year of its publication, and was translated into Spanish by the author and published under the title El código de la piel (2002). www.miren-agur-meabe.com.

IÑAKI MENDIGUREN has a degree in History. Among many other works he has translated the Harry Potter books into Basque (one of which earned him the 2002 Euskadi Award for the Best Literary Translation). He has also had two novels published. With his wife, Sarah Turtle, he is responsible for translating news items from Basque into English for the English Edition of the on-line Basque-language newspaper BERRIA.

SARAH MOON graduated  from Smith College in 2004 with majors in Comparative Literature and Spanish. She hopes to attend graduate school for an M.F.A in poetry and a M.A. in Translation Studies in Fall 2005.

PAUL MULDOON's most recent volume is Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. Born in 1951 in County Armagh, Muldoon now teaches at Princeton University and in 1999 was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. Paul Muldoon’s main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001).

DANIEL MURPHY teaches in the Department of Modern Languages at Hollins University where he offers classes on Hispanic literature, and on Spanish language and culture.  His special scholarly interest is in poetry and he is the author of Vicente Aleixandre’s Stream of Lyric Consciousness (Bucknell University Press, 2001).

JULIA OTXOA was born in 1953 in San Sebastián (Guipúzcoa). Poet and writer, her work has won various prizes. She is a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers, currently writing for Diario Vasco de San Sebastián; Diario Bilbao; the magazine Leer in Madrid, among others.  She has written over seven volumes of poetry and has been anthologized in several books of both regional and national contemporary poetry.

THALIA PANDIRI, Editor-in-Chief of Metamorphoses, is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Smith College.  She has published numerous translations from Modern Greek and Medieval Latin.

PAMELA PETRO, author of Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South, lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she works as a full-time writer.  She has contributed to the New York Times travel section, Atlantic Monthly, Islands, and Forbes publications.

PHOEBE PORTER received her BA in Spanish from Bryn Mawr College in 1975, her MA (1980) and her PhD (1985) in Hispanic Studies from Brown University. She has taught Spanish at a number of institutions including Wellesley Senior High School, Smith College, Colgate University and the University of New Hampshire. Her area of specialization is the Modern Spanish Novel with an emphasis on women writers from Spain. Her publications include articles on Emilia Pardo Bazán, Rosalía de Castro, and Benito Perez Galdós. She has also co-authored an anthology of Latin American short stories, Exploraciones imaginativas: Quince cuentos hispanoamericanos (MacMillan), and has translated a Spanish novel into English, Fiesta al noroeste by Ana María Matute (Celebration in the Northwest, Nebraska Press).

MANUEL RIVAS, a journalist, novelist and screenwriter, was born in La Coruña, Galicia, in 1957.  Many of his articles have been collected in Toxos e flores (1992), Galicia, el bonsai atlántico (Aguilar, 1994), El periodismo es un cuento (Alfaguara, 1997), and Galicia, Galicia (Aguilar, 2001). Writing in Galician, he has won both the Galician Critics’ Prize and the Spanish Critics’ Prize. His collection of short stories, ¿Qué me quieres, amor? (Alfaguara, 1996) won the National Narrative Prize.  One of the short stories included in it, “La Lengua de la Mariposa” was made into a movie, “Butterfly.”  Rivas is an active participant in the ‘Nunca Mais’ movement against the Prestige disaster off the coast of his native Galicia.

MONSERRAT ROIG was born in Barcelona in 1946.  She studied Theater and then Spanish philology at the University of Barcelona, where she later became a professor of Catalán. A journalist as well as an academic, she has written for El País, La Calle, and other major newspapers and also conducted interviews on her own television show. She won various awards for both fiction and non-fiction: her first novel Molta roba i poc sabó... i tan neta que la volen (1971)  won the Premio Victor Catalá, and her extensive research on Catalans in concentration camps earned her the Premio de la Crítica Serra d’Or. Roig died in Barcelona in 1991.

IXIAR ROZAS began his writing life studying journalism in Iruea (Pamplona).  After moving to Barcelona, he wrote his first novel, Edo zu edo ni (Either You or I; 2000), and later the poetry collection Patio bat bi itsasoen artean (A Courtyard Bewteen the Two Seas; 2001, Ernestina Champourcin Prize).  After returning to the Basque country, he wrote several young adult books, scripts for television and radio, and a book of short stories.

JOSEBA SARRIONANDIA was born in Iurreta (Bizkaia, Euskal Herria) in 1958.  He studied Basque philology and became a professor of phonetics. His first book of poetry Izuen Gordelekuen Barrena (Dentro de los escondites de los miedos) was published shortly before his arrest and incarceration for his membership in ETA. In 1985, he escaped from prison hidden inside a speaker. Since then, he travels the world writing, translating, and publishing his work. A collection of his poems (1985-1995) has the Swiftian title Hnuy illa nyha maja yahoo (Donostia: Elkar, 1995). Another  anthology of his work in which his voice can be heard on a CD is Hau da ene ondasun guzia (Nafarroa: Txalaparta, 1999).

ANNE SEXTON (1928-1974) became a poet after suffering from post-partum depression and enrolling in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for her collection Live or Die. She is the author of numerous volumes of poetry including: To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), and 45 Mercy Street (1976), the last volume published before her suicide in 1974.

CARMINE STARNINO is a Montreal poet, critic, and editor. Forthcoming in 2004 are his book of criticism on Canadian poetry, A Lover’s Quarrel, from Porcupine’s Quill Press, and, from Gaspereau Press, his third book of poems, With English Subtitles. Carmine’s first book, The New World (Vehicule Press, 1997), was nominated for the 1997 QSPELL A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the 1998 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book, and was selected by Quill & Quire as one of the best Canadian books of 1997. His second book, Credo (McGill-University Press, 2000), won the 2001 Canadian Authors Association Prize for Poetry and the 2001 David McKeen Award for Poetry. His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in a large number of national and international publications. Since 2001 he is also the poetry editor for Vehicule Press’s Signal Editions.

R. S. THOMAS (1913-2000) has been recognized in Wales as “quite simply our pre-eminent poet writing in the English language” and “one of the most uncompromising, purest and most sustained lyric voices of his century.” His poetry has been characterized as “slate-hard and sharp,” “spare,” “unflinching,” “honest.”  His first book of poetry, The Stones of the Field, was published in 1946, to be followed by another book every three or four years since. His Collected Poems 1945-1990 was published in 1993 by Dent and his autobiography Neb was published in Welsh in 1985; Autobiographies appeared in English in 1997.

ELI TOLARETXIPI born in San Sebastián in 1962, studied English philology and is a translator and poet. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Amor muerto, Naturaleza muerta (1999) and Los lazos del número (2003).

SARAH J. TURTLE holds a BA in Modern Languages. She taught English as a foreign language in the Basque Country for over 22 years before becoming a free-lance translator.

RICARDO UGARTE was born in 1942 in Pasajes San Pedro, Gipuzkoa. He is both a poet and an award-winning sculptor who has received prizes in the Basque Country, Spain, and Europe. His work was most recently featured in Donostia – San Sebastián – Monumental y Turística by Felipe Juaristi in 2003.