The full list of participants has now been released, and Carcanet is delighted that several of our poets from around the world have been chosen.
Bill Manhire was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He holds a personal chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he directs the celebrated creative writing programme and the International Institute of Modern Letters. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994.
Kay Ryan for the USA
Kay Ryan was born in California and has lived in Marin County, California, since 1971. She has received numerous awards for her poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Award. She has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2006, and was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. In 2011, Kay Ryan was awarded a $500,000 Fellowship by the MacArthur Foundation, in recognition of her exceptional poetry. Her UK book, Odd Blocks, is published by Carcanet.
Evelyn Schlag was born and raised in Waidhofen an der Ybbs in Lower Austria. She studied German and English literature at the University of Vienna, and taught in Vienna for a time before returning to Waidhofen, where she divides her time between teaching and writing. She has written seven volumes of prose fiction, a book of essays, and five collections of her own poetry.
Katharine Kilalea for South Africa
Originally from South Africa, Katharine Kilalea moved to London in 2005 to study for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her first book, One Eye’d Leigh was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under 30. She has received an Arts Council Award for poetry and her poems have appeared in publications including the 2010 Forward Prize Anthology, PN Review and Magma and performed on BBC Radio 3, as well as at festivals including the Wordsworth Trust Poetry Festival, Bridlington Poetry Festival and Worlds Literature Festival.
Venus Khoury Ghata is a Lebanese poet and novelist, resident in France since 1973, the author of sixteen collections of poems and twenty novels. She received the Prix Mallarme in 1987 for Monologue du mort, and the Grand Prix de la Societe des Gens de Lettres for Fables pour un people d'argile in 1992, and she was named a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur in 2000. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Dutch, German, Italian and Russian, and she herself translates contemporary Arabic poetry into French. She Says was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award in poetry in 2003. She was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie 2011.
Togara Muzanenhamo for Zimbabwe
Togara Muzanenhamo was born to Zimbabwean parents in Lusaka, Zambia in 1975. He was brought up in Zimbabwe, and then went on to study in The Hague and Paris. He became a journalist in Harare and worked for a film script production company. His work has appeared in magazines in Europe, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and was included in Carcanet's anthology New Poetries in 2002.
Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran and grew up on the Isle of Wight. She attended Drama Centre London and worked as a theatre director in London and in Tehran. She is the founder of The Poetry School where she now teaches. The Meanest Flower (2007) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2006 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.