Biographies

HODA ABLAN was born in 1971 in Eb, Yemen. In 1993 she gained a Masters degree in Political Science from Sana'a University. She has read her poems in several poetry festivals. She has published three collections, her first in Damascus, 1989, and her third in 1998.

SAMER ABU-HAWWASH was born in Beirut into a Palestinian family. He has published two collections of poetry and works as a arts journalist for Al-Mustaqbal newspaper, Beirut.

FAWZIYYA ABU-KHALID was born in Riyadh in 1959. She has BAs from Universities in Lebanon and the USA, and an MA from King Saud University, where she now lectures in sociology. She has published three books of poetry.

ADONIS was born Ali Ahmad Said in Kassabeen, Syria, in 1930, and adopted the name Adonis when he was 17. He co-founded Sh'ir poetry magazine, and later formed Muwaqaf, and is an internationally renowned poet, essayist, and theoretician of poetics. His lectures on Arab poetics in 1984 are published in English, translated by Catherine Cobham, as Introduction to Arab Poetics (Saqi Books, 1990).

FADHIL Al-AZZAWI was born in Kirkuk, north Iraq, in 1940. He has a BA in English Literature from Baghdad University, and a PhD in journalism from Leipzig University. He edited literary magazines and newspapers in Iraq and abroad, and has been publishing his poetry since the 1960s -- seven volumes of poetry, eight novels, a collection of short stories, two works of criticism and numerous translations into Arabic from English and German. His poetry has been translated into many languages, and he is soon to have a major selection of his works published in English. He left Iraq in 1977 and has settled in Germany. He is a consulting editor of Banipal.

CHARLES BAINBRIDGE lives and works in London.

DOUGLAS BARBOUR's books of poetry include Visible Visions: The Selected Poems of Douglas Barbour (NeWest Press 1984),  Story for a Saskatchewan Night (rdc press 1990), Fragmenting Body etc. (NeWest Press / SALT Publishing 2000), Breath Takes (Wolsak & Wynn 2001), and A Flame on the Spanish Stairs (greenboathousebooks 2002). His critical works include monographs on Daphne Marlatt, John Newlove and bpNihcol, Michael Ondaatje, and Lyric / Anti-lyric: essays on contemporary poetry (NeWest Press 2001). He lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

MOHAMMED BENNIS is a poet, born in Fez, Morocco, 1948. His first collection of poems was published in 1960 and to date eleven collections. In 1998, he published an essay, Crossing to the Blue Banks. Much of his work has been translated and published in French language. He was editor of al-Thaqafa Jadida until 1998 when it was closed down by the government, four books of essays, and translated several books from French into Arabic. He lectures at the College of Literature and Humanities in Rabat and is director of the Bayt al-Shi'r [House of Poetry of Morocco].

ABBAS BEYDOUN is a Lebanese poet who was born in Sûr (Tyre) in Lebanon.  He graduated in Arabic Literature from the Lebanese University and started writing on political affairs, but later turned to writing solely poetry. He has six collections of poetry and is very well known in the Arab world. He is presently Cultural Editor of As-Safir newspaper in Beirut.

SARGON BOULUS was born in Iraq in 1943 into an Assyrian family. He is a poet, short-story writer and translator of English-language poets into Arabic. He has published seven collections of poems and a volume of short stories. A study of his life and works Sargon Boulus: his Life and Writing (in Assyrian and Arabic) was published in Baghdad, 1999. He  lives in San Francisco, USA. He is a consulting editor of Banipal.

MTC CRONIN'S  work first appeared in print in early 1993. Since then has had hundreds of poems, a handful of short stories and numerous reviews and essays published in journals, ezines, newspapers and anthologies in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, the UK, Canada, South America and the USA. She has had six books and two booklets of poetry published, between them shortlisted for the Jessie Litchfield Award for Literature, the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, the Age Book of the Year (twice), the Qld Premier's Literary Awards, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry, the NSW Premier's Literary Awards and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Her most recent books are Bestseller (Vagabond Press, 2001) and My Lover's Back: 79 Love Poems (UQP, 2002). Her 2001 collection, Talking to Neruda's Questions (Vagabond Press), is being translated into Spanish by the poet Juan Garrido. A ninth book, beautiful, unfinished ~ PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM, is forthcoming through Salt Publishing (Cambridge, UK) in 2003. With Mireille Juchau (novelist, essayist and playwright) and Caitlin Newton-Broad (youth theatre director), Cronin runs Muse on Wheels, a group which provides writing workshops in secondary schools. She is also currently teaching writing and working on her doctorate, Poetry and Law: Discourses of the Social Heart, at the University of Technology, Sydney.

MAHMOUD DARWISH was born in 1941 in al-Barweh, Palestine, and grew up under Israeli occupation. He became the best-known Palestinian poet in the world. He published his first collection of poetry in 1960 and his latest, the 21st, in 2002, also seven volumes of prose. His work is translated into 22 different languages. In 1981 he started the literary quarterly Al-Karmel, which he still edits, now in Ramallah. In 1995, the English edition of his book Memory for Forgetfulness (trans. Ibrahim Muhawi), was published. A new French anthology of his work Poesie: La Terre nous est étroite was published in March 2000, also two collection in English translation, The Adam of two Edens. In April 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom. His epic poem 'State of Siege', written after the 2002 Israeli attack on Jenin refugee camp can be read in English translation on the internet. Banipal No 4 features his work, with more poems in No 15/16. An essay by Mahmoud Darwish on translating poetry is included in Banipal No 8.

QASSIM HADDAD is a Bahraini poet, well known throughout the Arab world. His first collection was published in 1970 and to date he has published more than 16 books, in Beirut, London, Bahrain, Morocco and Kuwait. Also Majnun Laila, a book of poetry and paintings, with Azzawi, and Blue Impossible, a book of poetry with the photography of the late Saudi photographer Saleh al-Azzaz.

BASSAM HAJJAR was born in 1955 in Sûr (Tyre), Lebanon. He has a diploma of advanced study in philosophy from the Sorbonne. He was cultural editor on the Lebanese newspapers An-Nahar and As-Safir, and now works for Al-Mustaqbal in Beirut. Since 1980 he has published 10 collections of poetry, and translated from French several novels, poetry collections and books of philosophy and literary criticism.

DAVID HOWARD (1959 - ) is a poet and founding editor of Takahe. His publications include: In the First Place (1991), Holding Company (1995), Shebang: Collected Poems 1980-2000 (2000) and the forthcoming collaboration with Fiona Pardington, How To Occupy Our Selves. He divides his time between the East Coast of the sparsely populated South Island of New Zealand and Leipzig in Germany.

INAYA JABER is a Lebanese poet and has published six collections of poetry. She works as a journalist on the Lebanese daily paper As-Safir. She has read her poems at festivals in Europe and the Middle East.

ABDEL KADER EL JANABI was born in Baghad in 1940. He left Iraq in 1971, and eventually settled in France. He has published poetry and essays, and translates between French and Arabic. In 1998 he published Éternité Volante, his translations of Ounsi el-Hage (Actes Sud), and in 1999, Le poème arabe moderne, his anthology of Arab poets. He edits the poetry magazine Arapoetica. He is a contributing editor of Banipal.

NOURI AL-JARRAH is a Syrian poet, born in Damascus in 1956. From 1981, he lived in Beirut, then Cyprus and London, working as a journalist.  He established Al-Katiba literary magazine of which 14 issues were published. He has published seven collections of poetry.

KADHIM JIHAD was born in south Iraq in 1955. He has lived in Paris since 1976. He is a poet and translator, publishing his poetry in literary magazines for 25 years, with two collections. He has translated into Arabic Arthur Rimbaud's collected works, and works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean Genet, Juan Goytisolo and recently Philippe Jaccottet. His 1036-page translation into Arabic of Dante's The Divine Comedy has just been published by UNESCO.

WALID KHAZENDAR is a Palestinian poet born in Gaza in 1950. In October 1997 he was awarded the Palestine Prize for Poetry for "his achievements and aesthetic originality in the prose poem". In 1998-1999, he was Arab Writer in Residence at the NESP, Oxford University. He has published three collections of poetry.

WAFA'A LAMRANI was born in 1960 in Al-Qasr al-Kabir, Morocco. In 1982, she received her diploma in Arabic Literature from the College of Literature and Humanities in Rabat. She lectures in Mohammedia and lives in Casablanca.  She is general secretary of the House of Poetry in Morocco. Lamrani has published three collections, and read her work at many Arab and European poetry festivals.

SOPHIE LEVY is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Women's Studies at the University of Toronto, working towards a thesis on experimental women's writing and theories of gendered language. Her work has appeared in Masthead, HOW(2), Queen Street Quarterly, Filling Station, and on BBC Radio Scotland. Marsh Fear/Fen Tiger, her first book of poetry (with Leo Mellor) was published April 2002 by Salt Publishing.

KHALID AL-MAALY is an Iraqi poet, born in al-Samawa, Iraq, in 1956. He has lived in Köln, Germany, since 1980, where he established a successful publishing house, Al-Kamel Verlag. Seven collections of his poetry have been published, and some in German as well as Arabic.  He has translated the poets al-Sayab, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus, Saadi Youssef and Unsi al-Hajj into German.

MOHAMMAD AL-MAGHUT is a poet, playwright, and columnist, born in 1934 in al-Salamiyaa, Syria. He has just three collections -- Huzn fi Daw' al-Qamar [Sadness in Moonlight, 1959], Ghurfa bi-malayin al-Judran [A Room with Millions of Walls, 1964] and al-Farah laysa Mihnati [Joy is not my Profession, 1970], and was the first modern Arab poet to bring attention to the colourful complexities of the simple life.  He introduced Arabic poetics to current and newly-coined words, sometimes even slang-words juxtaposed in simple phrases creating a cadence previously unknown. Written during his exile in Beirut, his poetry -- which is among the pioneer works of non-metrical Arabic free verse -- is a cry in the jungle of language against the ruthless world of exile. He presented a new vision of life that was an access to the unknown for new generations of poets, and is still an influential force in modern Arab poetry. He has also two plays, The Hunchbacked Bird (1967), The Clown (1974), a novel, The Seesaw (1991), and two collections of his satirical articles. Since 1970 Al-Maghut has published no new poems, but poetry still remains the hidden passion of this clear-sighted man, as he says himself: "To be a great poet in the Arab world, one must be sincere; to be sincere one must be a free man; to be free one must live; and to live one must keep mum . . . You sicken me, poetry, you immortal and divine carrion!"

MARAM AL-MASSRI is from Latakia in Syria. She studied English Literature at Damascus University, then started publishing her poetry in Arab magazines in the 1970s.  Her second collection won the Adonis Prize for Poetry in 1997. Some of her work has been translated into French. A major volume of her poetry in English translation by Khaled Mattawa is to be published in the UK in 2004.

IMAN MERSAL was born in Mansourah, Egypt, in 1966. She has published three collections of poetry.

DUNYA MIKHAIL was born in Baghdad in 1965.  She studied English literature at Baghdad University and has published three collections of poetry in Iraq and one in Tunisia (1997). She has lived in Michigan, USA, since 1996 and is studying for an MA degree in Oriental Studies at Wayne State University, USA.

DREW MILNE's recent books of poetry include The Damage: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2001) and Mars Disarmed (The Figures, 2002). Earlier books include Sheet Mettle (Alfred David Editions, 1994) and Bench Marks (Alfred David Editions, 1998). He edits the occasional journal Parataxis: Modernism and Modern Writing and Parataxis Editions. He co-edited Marxist Literary Theory (Blackwell, 1996) with Terry Eagleton. Forthcoming publications include an anthology entitled Modern Critical Thought (Blackwell, 2003). He has recently published essays on Shakespeare, Beckett, John McGrath and James Kelman. For details of all Drew Milne's publications, see his webpage: drewmilne.tripod.com

ZAKARIA MOHAMMED is a Palestinian poet, born in 1951 near Nablus. He studied Arabic literature at Baghdad University.  and lives in Ramallah. He is deputy editor of Al-Karmel magazine of Mahmoud Darwish. He has published three collections of poetry, a novel,  and in 1999 a collection of plays. He lives in Ramallah and is a member of the board of directors of the Sakakini Cultural Centre.

NACIRA MOHAMMEDI is an Algerian poet, journalist and radio broadcaster on cultural affairs. She publishes her poetry in newspapers and has two collections.

SAADIA MUFARRAH is a poet and critic, and works as arts editor of Al-Qabas daily newspaper in Kuwait. She graduated from Kuwait University in Arabic Language and Education in 1987, and has published four collections of poetry.

SHEILA E. MURPHY lives in Phoenix, Arizona; her most recent books are The Stuttering of Wings (Stride Press, 2002) and Heresiarch (Xtant/Anabasis, 2002). Forthcoming is Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003).

KHALED NAJAR was born in Tunis in 1949 and has travelled to many countries.  He has published poems since the late 1960s.  He is a Lorcian poet, known as one of Tunisia's most lyrical of poets, but he shuns publication and has published only one volume of poetry with Riyad el-Rayyes, London 1990.

HASSAN NAJMI was born in 1959 in Ibn Ahme, Morocco.  He has a diploma in Arabic literature from Rabat College of Literature and Humanities. In 1977, he started publishing his work in various newspapers. He has published four collections of poems, one novel and two books of essays, one with Moroccan artist Kacimi. He is arts editor of Al-Ittihad al-Ishtiraki and president of the Moroccan Union of Writers.

IBRAHIM NASRALLAH was born in Amman into a Palestinian family in 1954. He taught in Saudi Arabia for 2 years and worked as a journalist 1978-96. Now he is cultural activities at Darat al-Funun. he has 10 collections of poetry, seven novels, two children's books. He is translated into several languages, with one novel in English. He won the 'Arrar prize (1991), the Sultan Oweis prize for his poetry (1987) and the Tayseer Sbool Prize for a novel (1994).

AMJAD NASSER was born in 1955 in al-Turra, Jordan. From 1976 he worked as a journalist in television and newspapers, then in the cultural section of Al-Hadaf journal in Beirut, and in Cyprus was arts editor of Al-Ufq magazine. Since 1987 he has been Arts Editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi daily newspaper in London. He has published nine collections of poetry and one travel book. Three different volumes of selected poetry have been published, in Cairo in 1995, in 1999 by the House of Poetry in Palestine. In 1998 selected poems were published in French, introduced by Adonis, and in 2000 a volume of his poems was published in Italian. He is one of the founding editors of Banipal magazine.

CLAUDIO PARENTELA is an illustrator, mail artist and cartoonist active in the international underground scene. He collaborates with many zines,  magazines and with publishers in Italy and around the world.  During the 1999 he was guest at the Break 21 Festival in Ljubljana (Slovenja). His strange artworks are included in many webart galleries in the immense web. In these last months he has exhibited his artworks at the association Microcosmo (Torino ); the Girasole (Villa Basilica-Italy); the Tabula Rasa (Barcellona-Espain); the Galerie Slaphanger (Amsterdam), and in the next months he'll exhibit at the Gallery Soqquadro (Rome ) and La Cueva (Milan).  He collaborates with various labels & bands of industrial, noise,  metal, punx music.  Booklets of illustrations and comics include The Slavering Rat and The Halved Nightmare (Innovation Studio-BGA Comix-Italy), Fashion Robot (David Lasky-Seattle/USA), Stories and Il Bombarolo (Progetto Siderurgiko-Italy), The Sacrificial Lamb and The Hanged Salamander at the PatË 666 (Medicina Nucleare-Italy), Claudio Parentela (Romantika Productions-Italy), Eudemoni and Small Black Trilogy (Poems by Alberto Rizzi and Cristiano Quadalti, illustrations by Claudio Parentela, Criatu Productions, Italy), Jeanne Dark You Got Balls and The Frogs' Ballet (Self-produced), Black Kisses and Other Stories and The Book of Secrets (La Cafetiere Editions-Belgium). c_parentela@libero. it

NICOLE PEYRAFITTE was born & raised in Luchon, French Pyrenees.  She left her hometown, where she was a cook in the family hotel-restaurant business.  She then lived in Toulouse, Paris.  Arrived in the United States in 1987.  First settled in Southern California and moved to Albany New York in 1992 where she still is.  Like the wilful child in Marguerite Duras' Les Enfants, she resisted going to school, "Because they were trying to teach me things that I didn't know."  Each step of her work attempts to fulfill her compulsion to learn through a process of immersion that generates performances incorporating voice/paintings/drawings/ collages/writing & cooking.  Peyrafitte performs locally, nationally and in Europe.  For details and more information visit her website at: www.nicolepeyrafitte.com

SAIF AL-RAHBI is a poet and prose writer, born in 1956 in Sroor, a village in the interior of Oman.  In 1970, he travelled abroad, living and working in Cairo, Damascus, Algeria, Paris and London and other Arab and European cities. He is editor-in-chief of Nizwa, Oman's quarterly cultural magazine. He has published a number of volumes of poetry and prose and essays and is a consulting editor of Banipal.

ABDEL-MONEM RAMADAN was born in Cairo in 1951, where he still lives and works. He has published three collections of poetry.

FUAD RIFQA was born in 1930 in Kafroun, Syria, and graduated from the American University of Beirut and Tübingen University, Germany, later spending some years in the USA. In the late 1950s he co-founded Shi'r poetry magazine with Yusuf al-Khal and Adonis. He has lived in Lebanon for many years and is Distinguished Professor of Arabic Philosophy at the American University of Beirut. He has published numerous collections of poetry, and is an important translator into Arabic of Rilke, Hölderlin and other German authors.

REBECCA SEIFERLE'S third new poetry collection, Bitters (Copper Canyon Press, 2001) won the Western States Book Award and a Pushcart Prize. She is also the author of The Music We Dance To (Sheep Meadow, 1999), poems from which won the Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America.  Her first collection, The Ripped-Out Seam, won the Bogin Award and the Writer's Exchange Award. Her new translation of Cesar Vallejo's The Black Heralds is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in late 2003. She is the founding editor of www.thedrunkenboat.com, an online magazine of international poetry and poetry-in-translation.

HASHIM SHAFIQ was born in Iraq in 1950.  He started publishing poems in Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, Nicosia, Prague and London, where he now lives. He has published ten volumes of poetry and one novel. Selected poems have been translated into English, French, German, Italian and Polish.

DAN SPIELMAN is a Melbourne-based writer and performer.  He is currently translating the corpus of Arthur Rimbaud.  His theatre work includes over a dozen seasons with the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, an award winning collaboration between playwright Daniel Keene and director Ariette Taylor.  He has performed with the Sydney Theatre company in Attempts on Her Life and The Cripple of Inishmaan; with the Melbourne Theatre Company in The Seagull; on TV, short film and feature film.  He was awarded a Churchill Fellowship (02/03) to continue his Rimbaud translations in Paris and further explore European stage, radio, and poetry.

ALES STEGER was born in Ptuj, Slovenia. He studied Comparative Literature and German at University of Ljubljana. He has published three volumes of poetry: Sahovnice ur (Chess desks of Hours) 1995, Kasmir (Kashmere) 1997, Protuberance (Protuberances) 2002 and a prose book on Peru Vèasih je januar sredi poletja (January In the Middle of Summer) 1999. His books have been awarded and translated into several languages. He lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

SAADI YOUSSEF was born near Basra, Iraq, in 1934 and started writing poetry at the age of 17. He was educated in Basra and Baghdad, and worked in teaching and literary journalism. In 1958 he published his fourth and a now-renowned collection, 51 poems, following the overthrow of the monarchy in Iraq. He left his country for the second and last time in 1979 and has lived in Syria, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Yemen, France and Jordan, and during the late sixties and seventies for many years in Algeria. He has published more than 30 collections of poetry, a volume of short stories, two novels, some essays, and four volumes of his collected works and has received several literary awards. He has translated major international poets from English into Arabic, including Walt Whitman, C P Cavafy, Yannos Ritsos, Federico Garcia Lorca, Vasco Popa and Ungaretti, also novels by Ngugi wa Thiongo, Wole Soyinka, Nourridine Farah, George Orwell,  David Malouf and V S Naipaul. His poetry has been translated into several languages, including French, Loin du premier ciel [Far from the first sky], Actes Sud, Paris, 1999, and most recently in English b y the Libyan/American poet Khaled Mattawa, Without an Alphabet, Without a Face (Graywolf Press, 2002). Saadi Youssef lives in London. He is a contributing editor of Banipal.

GHASSAN ZAQTAN is a Palestinian poet, born in 1954 in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem. He lived in Amman from 1967 to 1979, and then went to Beirut. From 1982-86 he lived in Tunis, and now lives in Ramallah. He has published several collections of poetry, a novel and made two documentary films. He is editor-in-chief of Al-Shuara quarterly [The Poets] published by the House of Poetry, Ramallah.