Jennifer Arnold
Jennifer Arnold is a research fellow at the University of Birmingham. She is compiling and translating a critical anthology of Spanish and Catalan exile literature as part of the Leverhulme-funded project Inner and outer exile in fascist Germany and Spain: a comparative study. She was awarded her PhD in 2017 and her thesis examined the translation and reception of Catalan literature into English. She translates professionally from Spanish and Catalan, specializing in academic and literary texts. Jennifer was the recipient of the Emerging Translator Mentorship for Catalan in 2016, organized by the Writers Centre Norwich, UK, during which she spent a year working with Peter Bush, translating the collection of short stories El parèntesi més llarg by Tina Vallès.
Mònica Batet
Born in Tarragona (Catalonia), Mònica Batet studied Catalan Philology at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. She has written four novels and several short stories. Her second novel (2015), No et miris el Riu (Don’t Look at the River), was selected as a finalist for the Crexells award. Her third novel (2012), Neu, óssos blancs i alguns homes més valents que els altres (Snow, Bears and Some Men Braver than Others), received a subsidy from the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes.
Megan Berkobien
Megan Berkobien is an activist, writer, and translator. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in the journals Words without Borders, A Public Space, and Poets & Writers, among many others. She founded the Emerging Translators Collective in 2017.
Lolita Bosch
Lolita Bosch (1970) was born in Barcelona, but has lived in Albons (Girona, Spain), the US, India, Oaxaca, and Mexico City—she has long considered Mexico her second home. She is a novelist and also writes children’s and young adult fiction, pens essays, edits anthologies, researches, and works as a journalist. Her work has been recognized with various prestigious prizes, brought to both cinema and stage, and translated into various languages (though not English). Bosch’s work is both profoundly personal and experimental.
Mireia Calafell
Mireia Calafell (1980) is the author of Poètiques del cos (2006), Costures (2009) and Tantes mudes (2014). In 2015, she was awarded the Lletra d’Or for the best book published in Catalan for Tantes mudes, which has recently been translated into Spanish (Stendhal Books, 2016). Her poetry has been included in anthologies published in Argentina, Brazil, Holland, the UK, the United Arab Emirates, and Spain.
Esperança Camps
Esperança Camps is a Menorcan journalist and writer who now resides in Valencia. She is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Joanot Martorell Prize and Critics’ Prize for Valencian Writers for her first published work, the City of Alzira Prize, the Odissea Readers’ Prize, the Vicent Andrés Estellés Prize, and the Blai Bellver Prize. In addition to teaching creative writing at the University of Valencia, she writes short stories and novels and works as a journalist in print, radio, and television.
Harriet Cook
Funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, Harriet Cook is a third-year PhD student at King's College London where she is working on medieval Galician-Portuguese love lyric. She graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2013 with a degree in Modern and Medieval Languages and has since completed an MA in medieval studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela. In her spare time she works on translations from Catalan and Galician into English.
M. Mercè Cuartiella
M. Mercè Cuartiella is a Catalan writer and dramaturg. This story is taken from her short story collection Gent que tu coneixes (Proa, 2015), recipient of the Premi Mercé Rodoreda for outstanding Catalan short fiction in 2014. She has published several novels, including Germans, gairebé bessons (Brau Edicions, 2012) which was awarded the Premi Llibreter in the category of Catalan literature in 2012 by the Gremi de Llibreters de Barcelona i Catalunya. Her most recent novel, Flor salvatge (Editorial Empúries) was published in 2018. She resides in Figueres with her husband, Joan Manuel Soldevilla.
Bethan Cunningham
Bethan Cunningham is a Barcelona-based freelance translator from South Wales with a love of the Països Catalans. She holds an MA in Translation Studies from Cardiff University and translates literary and cultural texts from Catalan, Spanish, and French into English.
Alba Dedeu
Alba Dedeu (1984) is a writer, translator, and editor. Her first short-story collection, Gats al Parc (Proa, 2011) won the Mercè Rodoreda Prize as well as the Crítica Serra d’Or prize, after which she published her second short-story collection, L’estiu no s’acaba mai (Proa, 2012).
Nathan Douglas
Nathan Douglas (1993) grew up in rural central Illinois, where a conveniently timed identity crisis led him to reconnect with his Cuban heritage as a teenager and become a lover of the study of languages and cultures. Since studying abroad in Barcelona while an undergraduate at Illinois Wesleyan University, Nathan has felt a special tie to the Catalan language and people. While Lolita Bosch claims Mexico as her second home, Nathan has chosen to make his own in the ciutat comtal whenever possible. In the US, he is currently pursuing his PhD in Hispanic Literatures at Indiana University—Bloomington, where he received his MA in 2017. Nathan broadly focuses on post-Franco Iberia, with a special focus on contemporary Catalan literature and politics; other scholarly interests include questions of gender, philosophy, and trauma, particularly as these areas of studies all convalesce upon psychoanalysis. His dissertation focuses upon writings of twenty-first century Spanish authors, many of them Catalan, that, in his view, provide a crucial fulcrum to our understandings of a broken Spanish state that continues to hold dear to its claim to national integrity vested in the signing of its post-Franco Constitution in 1978.
Najat El Hachmi
Najat El Hachmi (Morocco, 1979) is one of the most celebrated authors of her generation. She holds a degree in Arabic Studies from the University of Barcelona. She is the author of a personal essay on her bicultural identity, I Am Also Catalan, and four novels, the first of which earned her the 2008 Ramon Llull Prize, the 2009 Pirx Ulysse, and was a finalist for the 2009 Méditerranée Étranger.
Kate Good
Kate Good is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Grinnell College, where she teaches Spanish language and literature courses. Outside of the classroom, Kate translates academic and literary work from Catalan and Spanish to English and researches nineteenth- through twenty-first-century Peninsular literature and cultural production. Her scholarship engages with representations of gender, sexuality, and ability, examining also issues of translation and national identity in the Catalan context.
María Cristina Hall
María Cristina Hall (New York, 1991) is a Mexican-American poet, translator, and editor who works for several political analysis think tanks in Mexico City. She also teaches Chicano and border literature and is an immigration activist. Former editor of La Cigarra and Mexico City Lit.
Cortney Hamilton
Cortney Hamilton is completing a PhD in Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. Her research focuses on questions of gender and modernity at the end of empire in nineteenth-century Spain.
Gabriella Martin
Gabriella Martin is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, specializing in contemporary Iberian literature and translation studies. Her translations from the Spanish have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail in Translation and Asymptote.
Laia Martinez i Lopez
Laia Martinez i Lopez is a Catalan writer, translator, and musician. Her book-length poetry collections include L’abc de Laia Martinez i Lopez (Documenta Balear, 2009), L’estiu del tonight, tonight (El Gall Editor, 2011), Cançó amb esgarrip i dos poemes (Lleonard Muntaner, Editor, 2015) i Afollada (LaBreu edicions, 2016).
Alicia Meier
Alicia Maria Meier is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn. She earned her MFA in nonfiction writing and literary translation from Columbia University in 2015, and currently manages Global Programs for Columbia’s School of the Arts—among them the Writing Program’s literary translation exchange program, Word for Word. She is the recipient of a 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for her translation from the Catalan of Marta Carnicero’s The Sky According to Google.
Elisa Munsó
Elisa Munsó is an artist and illustrator. In 2013, she opened her gallery El Diluvio Universal in Gràcia, Barcelona.
Bel Olid
Bel Olid (Mataró, 1977) is a Catalan writer, translator, and advocate of women’s and queer rights. She is president of the Association of Catalan Language Writers and her work as an author includes children’s books, short stories, novels and nonfiction (notably her pocket guide to feminism, Feminisme de butxaca: Kit de supervivència).
Anna Pantinat
Anna Pantinat (Barcelona, 1977) is a scenic artist and author of Construcció de la nit and De sobte, un estiu (Suddenly a Summer). She sings, plays keyboards and the theremin, and composes for Pentina’t Lula. Her work has appeared in Gent Normal, Cabaret Elèctric, and Revista de letras. She also oversees, alongside Daniel Ardura, the label Repetidor Disc.
Katherine Reynolds
Katherine Reynolds is a language teacher with a fascination for minority languages. She holds a Master’s in Catalan Literature and Linguistics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and researches linguistic and cultural normalization in the Catalan media. She has been translating Catalan since 2014.
Llucia Ramis
Llucia Ramis (Palma, 1977) is a writer and a print and radio journalist who has worked in Barcelona for over two decades. Her work was recognized in 2010 with the Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel Award, and that same year she won the Josep Pla Prize for her second novel. In 2013, Time Out Barcelona named her Creator of the Year. Her most recent book, The Possessions, earned her the 2018 Anagrama Prize.
Marta Rojals
Marta Rojals was born in La Palma d’Ebre (Ribera d’ebro) in Catalonia, Spain. She holds a degree in architecture from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, where she majored in theory, history, and criticism. She currently works as a translator and editor and writes nonfiction for a variety of publications, including the Catalan online news source Vilaweb. She is the author of two novels, Primavera, estiu, etcètera (La Magrana, 2011) and L'altra (La Magrana, 2014).
Julia Sanches
Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Catalan. Her book-length translations are Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques and What Are the Blind Men Dreaming? by Noemi Jaffe. Her shorter translations have appeared in Suelta, the Washington Review, Asymptote, Two Lines, Granta, Tin House, Words Without Borders, and Revista Machado, among others. A former literary agent, she is cofounder of the collective Cedilla & Co.
Maria Pilar Senpau
Maria Pilar Senpau Jove is best known for her work as a dietitian and has written numerous books on topics related to food and health. This short story comes from her first work of fiction, Gent que plora en silenci (Those Who Cry in Silence) (Proa 2014).
Scott Shanahan
Scott Shanahan is a translator of Iberian languages.
Natasha Tanna
Natasha Tanna is Lecturer in Spanish at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. She specializes in modern Latin American, Spanish, and Catalan literature, with a particular focus on gender, sexuality, exile, diaspora, and transnational identities. Her forthcoming book Queer Genealogies in Transnational Barcelona (Legenda) explores queer temporalities and alternative communities in works published from the 1960s onwards by the Catalan Maria-Mercè Marçal, Montevideo-born Cristina Peri Rossi, and Buenos Aires-born Flavia Company.
Tina Vallès
Tina Vallès is a writer, editor, and translator from Barcelona. She is the author of numerous collections of short stories, novels, and books for children. In 2012, she won the Mercè Rodoreda prize for her collection, El Parèntesi més llarg (In Parenthesis . . .), and her latest novel, La memòria de l'arbre (The Memory of the Tree), was recently awarded the Anagrama Prize. She is also co-founder and co-editor of Paper de vidre, an online journal dedicated to short stories in Catalan, featuring posts from some of the major names in Catalan literature today.
Mireia Vidal-Conte
Mireia Vidal-Conte is a poet and translator who has been published in Poetari, Caràcters, Llavor Cultural, Núvol, and El Punt Avui. She edited the anthology Com elles, una antologia de poesia del s. XX (Lleonard Muntaner, 2017). She has translated works by Anne Sexton, Anne Carson, and Brigitte Oleschinski, among others.
Anna Maria Villalonga
Anna Maria Villalonga is a writer, film critic, and lecturer in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Barcelona.
Adrian Nathan West
Adrian Nathan West is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and translator of more than a dozen books from Spanish, German, and Catalan. His fiction and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and many other journals in print and online.