From left to right: Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Pajtim Statovci, Tore Renberg, Kamila Shamsie, and Jo Nesbø. On a recent Saturday, the Southbank Centre in central London was home to a live…

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ta-Neihisi Coates in conversation at AWP / Photo: Alexandra Goodman Armed with a printed schedule and a head full of advice, I walked boldly into my first ever AWP. I was…

The Free Minds book club and writing workshop at AWP empowered young inmates to “write new chapters in their lives.” Said Nokomis, “Free Minds encouraged me to be a better writer . . . to be a bigger…

It’s no secret that the city of Austin is a music-festival mecca, but this November the 21st annual Texas Book Festival proved that a literary festival can equally flourish and energize this arts-and-…

Courtesy of the SARAS Institute Last month I had the marvelous opportunity, as a poet, of participating in the annual conference of an international scientific organization, the South American Instit…

Arch of Marcus Aurelius, Tripoli. Photo by Neil Weightman. “Whoever is uprooted, uproots others.” Simone Weil’s wise words to Charles de Gaulle, future president of France, in 1943, with France still…

Josías López Gómez. Photo by Dr. Arturo Arias/ www.utexas.edu I’m in Guadalajara as one of three judges for the Premio de Literaturas Indígenas de las Américas (Prize for Indigenous Literatures of th…

Participants at the first South Asian Diaspora Poetry Festival  I have just returned from an extraordinary journey into the Republic of Poetry. The occasion was the first South Asian Diaspora Poetry…

Poets attending the 2015 Festival Internacional de Poesía in Granada, Nicaragua. Photo: Arnulfo Agüero In her spellbinding The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War (2002), Giocond…

Photos by Jordan Woodward As I opened to the first page of Yellowcake, a novel chronicling the lives of uranium miners in Colorado and New Mexico, I was sitting in the entryway to my…

Mohamed Nedali’s debut novel, Morceaux de choix: les amours d’un apprenti-boucher, was selected by Nobel laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio as the winner of the Prix Grand Atlas in 2005. I recen…

Dipika Mukherjee reports on the first-ever Migrant Workers Poetry Competition in Singapore, at which construction-site laborers read their poems in November. Rarely is poetry, with its messy…

For more on Santa Fe’s Biblioteca Amigos Library, read Figueroa's outpost featuring this bilingual literary hub in the November 2014 issue of World Literature Today. I have read Fahrenhei…

I land in Los Angeles and meet up with Mandy Kahn and David Shook, who’ve just returned from a week in Seattle, armed with a box of poetry from AWP. After Mandy drops us off, David and I grab a quick…

From left: K. Anis Ahmed, Eliot Weinberger, and Pankaj Mishra at the Hay Festival Dhaka, November 14, 2013. A foreignness defined only by place of production or setting is rath…

Dhaka Taxis. Photo by v i p e z/Flickr I’m in Dhaka, Bangladesh, for just the second time, almost exactly one year after my first visit, but things are eerily different. The drive from Dhaka Internat…

André Naffis-Sahely and Breyten Breytenbach. Photo by Victor Dlamini Part 2 continues with highlights from the “Dancing in Other Words” festival; if you haven’t read part 1 and…

After being invited by Breyten Breytenbach to attend the “Dancing in Other Words” festival in Stellenbosch, South Africa, this past May, André Naffis-Sahely sent us the following travelogue. Part…

In 2007 Persian English translator and writer Raha Namy set off on a bicycle ride through Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, coming to a stop at the Occupied Territories of the West Bank (Israel). She an…

In my travels around the global literary scene, the question of a writerly identity has never seemed more precarious, conflicted, and urgent than with writers from Africa. More often…

K. Anis Ahmed Last Thursday, the second annual Dhaka Hay Festival opened with a moderated dialogue between Pakistani novelist Mohammed Hanif and the most exciting new Bangladeshi talent writing in En…

Last week Tijuana celebrated the tenth annual Festival de Literatura del Noroeste (FeLiNo), which began on 7 November, at its Cultural Center. The center itself is celebrating its thirtieth anniversar…

From the Clinton Library, a view of a bridge crossing the Arkansas River. Every two years a group of outstanding international writers gathers for the International Conference on the Short Story in E…

It’s not every day I get to meet the photographers whose portraits provide a glimpse into the lives of the authors we feature in WLT. So when I heard about the evolving exhibit of author port…

He decided to make a selection that would be as arbitrary as it was brilliant. . . . Very quickly the idea of selling books that he himself would not advise people to read infuriated him. . . . Al…