December 12, 2023
October 24, 2023
Authors
Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
Xi Xi
Xi Xi (the pen name of Cheung Yin) has written more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. One of Hong Kong’s most beloved and prolific authors, she has won numerous international awards, most recently the 2019 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature.
Xiao Hai
Xiao Hai (b. 1987) came from Shangqiu City in Henan Province, the philosopher Zhuangzi’s hometown. He has drifted in different cities as a migrant worker for many years and composed over five hundred poems. He was a member of the Picun Literature Group and won the Best Poet prize at the First Laborers’ Literature Awards.
Xiao An
Xiao An (b. 1964) is often regarded as a “poet’s poet” in China. One of the few women in the experimental poetry group feifei, meaning “neither/nor,” she has been working as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital for twenty years while steadily publishing poetry. Her writing is influenced by classical Chinese poetry but has a contemporary feel in its themes and sensibility.
PHOTO: Paul Hiltondiv>Xu Xi
Xu Xi (@xuxiwriter) is the author of fourteen books, most recently This Fish Is Fowl: Essays of Being (2019). An Indonesian-Chinese-American diehard transnational, she splits her life, unevenly, between the state of New York and the rest of the world.
Min Yang
Min Yang is an assistant professor of Chinese Studies, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Bowling Green State University. Her research interests include trauma studies, contemporary Chinese literature, and visual culture.
Oksana Yefimenko
Oksana Yefimenko is a Ukrainian poet and literary translator whose work has appeared in Frontier, an anthology of modern Ukrainian poetry (Glagoslav, 2017).
Yi Sha
Yi Sha, born in Chengdu in 1966, is considered one of China’s foremost avant-garde writers. He has published over twenty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; his influential online column, New Century Poetry Canon, recommends a poem a day to a wide readership throughout the Chinese-speaking world.
Hülya Yıldız
Hülya Yıldız is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara.
Yūichi Yokoyama
Yūichi Yokoyama was born in 1967 in Miyazaki, Japan, and currently lives and works in a Tokyo suburb. He received his MFA in oil painting from Musashino Art University in 1990 and has been active as a manga artist since 1995.
Yoo Heekyung
Yoo Heekyung 유희경 is a South Korean poet and playwright. He is the author of Oneul achim daneo (2011), Dangsinui jari – namuro jaraneun bangbeop (2013), Uriege jamsi sinieotdeon (2018), and other collections. He is a playwright with the theater company 독 (dock) and a member of the poetry collective 작란 (作亂) (jaknan). In 2019 Yoo was awarded the Hyundae Munhak Sang (Contemporary Literature Award) for his poetry. He runs ,wit n cynical, a series of poetry bookstores and project spaces in Seoul.
Yoo An-Jin
Yoo An-Jin is a Korean poet, essayist, and novelist. In 1970 she published the first of the seventeen collections of poetry she has published so far. She retired from her position as a professor at Seoul National University in 2006. In 2012 she became a member of Korea’s National Academy of Arts. She has received many prestigious literary awards.
Yoss
Two of Yoss’s science-fiction novels have been translated into English: A Planet for Rent and Super Extra Grande. In 2017 his space opera, Condomnauts, was published in English. Born in Havana in 1969, Yoss is also the lead singer in the heavy-metal band Tenaz.
Lee Young-Kwang
Lee Young-Kwang is a professor of creative writing and media studies at Korea University. He has published four collections of poetry; in 2011 All the Evening Wishes won the prestigious Mi-Dang literature award. Other awards include the Roe-Jak Prize (2008) and Ji-Hoon Prize for Literature (2011).
Saadi Youssef
Born near Basra, Iraq, Saadi Youssef (1934–2021) was considered one of the most important contemporary poets in the Arab world. Following his experience as a political prisoner in Iraq, he spent most of his life in exile, working as a journalist and activist throughout North Africa and the Middle East. He authored over thirty books of poetry, two novels, and a book of short stories. Youssef lived in London at the time of his death, where he was a leading translator of English literature into Arabic. He translated works by many major writers, including Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, C. P. Cavafy, Vasko Popa, and Giuseppe Ungaretti.
Yu Jian
One of China’s leading avant-garde poets, Yu Jian (b. 1954) began writing poetry in the 1970s. A versatile and prolific writer, he has published over forty books of poetry, prose, essays, and photography. His controversial 1994 poem, “File Zero,” is considered one of the most innovative and radical works in the history of contemporary Chinese poetry. He lives in Kunming, China.
Kyūsaku Yumeno
Kyūsaku Yumeno, which translates roughly to “a field where dreams are always growing,” was the pen name of the Japanese writer Taidō Sugiyama (b. 1889). Notorious in Japan for unusual, often downright bizarre detective stories, Yumeno is famous as one of Japan’s first avant-garde writers and as a product of the rapid modernization and westernization of the Taishō era (1912–26). His magnum opus, the experimental mystery Dogura Magura, was adapted for film in the late 1980s. He died suddenly at the age of forty-seven in 1936.
Rasool Yunan
Rasool Yunan is an Iranian poet, novelist, playwright, and short-story writer. Born in Urmia, Iran, in 1969, Yunan rose to fame for his poetry collections, but he has turned toward microfiction in his latest collections: You Were Late So We Ate Dinner, Careful, Don’t Hit Your Head on the Chandelier, and A Cottage in a Snow-Covered Field. His most recent publication is a 2018 best-selling novel entitled The Journey Was Long So We Spoke of Love.
Photo by Moti Kikayon / Wikipediadiv>Natan Zach
Natan Zach was born Harry Seitelbach in 1930 to a German Jewish father and an Italian mother. His ten published books of poetry were collected in The Complete Poems in three volumes (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008), which also included new poems, and many of his influential essays were collected in the volume The Poetry beyond Words: Critical Essays, 1954–1973 (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2011).
Musa Zafar
Musa Zafar is a prominent human rights activist and satirist from Afghanistan; forced to live in exile since 2016, he is currently living in the Republic of Fiji. He has been writing satire columns for different Persian newspapers and online magazines since 2013 and has been critical of political, religious, and cultural inadequacies. He is allergic to plastic shopping bags, plastic bottles, and people who think they are following the world’s only true religion.
Adam Zagajewski
Adam Zagajewski (b. 1945) was born in the city of Lwów (now Lvov, Ukrainian SSR), but was forced to leave as an infant when the Red Army occupied the city. After studying philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, he emigrated to Paris, where he would remain until 2002. He began writing poetry in the 1970s and helped lead the movement that would come to be known as the Polish New Wave. He built his career around teaching at various universities around the world, including the University of Houston and the University of Chicago in the United States.
Sherouk Zakaria
Sherouk Zakaria has been working in media for the last eight years and is passionate about communication and storytelling across different platforms. She worked as a multimedia producer and journalist at Khaleej Times newspaper, and some of the stories she reported made their way to global media outlets including The Guardian, The Independent, and BBC. She was part of the communications team at the UAE Government Media Office, under the Ministry of Cabinet Affairs, where she led the English content of groundbreaking campaigns including the recent “Projects of the 50,” the Emirates Mars Mission, and the UAE Nation Brand. She is currently a journalist for Arab News. She obtained a certification in digital marketing from Ireland’s Digital Marketing Institute and an MA in global media and digital cultures at SOAS University of London.
Sepideh Zamani
Sepideh Zamani (born in northern Iran) graduated from law school in 1999 and moved to the United States a year later. Her novels, short stories, essays, and poetry focus on immigration, gender inequality, and the lives of ethnic and religious minorities under cultural cleansing.
Photo by Omar Faundezdiv>Alejandro Zambra
Alejandro Zambra (born 1975) is a poet, fiction writer, and literary critic born in Santiago, Chile. He studied at the Instituto Nacional and the University of Chile. He currently teaches at the School of Literature at the Diego Portales University in Santiago. He has contributed articles on literature in newspapers The Latest News, The Clinic, El Mercurio and La Tercera, and magazines such as Turia and Letras Libres.
