Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
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.
Tatsiana Zamirovskaya
Tatsiana Zamirovskaya is a writer from Minsk, Belarus, who moved to Brooklyn in 2015. The author of three short-story collections, her recent book of metaphysical sci-fi stories, The Land of Random Numbers (2019), was longlisted for the Russian National Bestseller Award and NOS Literary Award. Her first novel, The Deadnet, will be published in 2021 by AST/Elena Shubina Imprint.
Alessio Zanelli
Alessio Zanelli,Italian by birth, has long adopted English as his writing language and has appeared in literary magazines in a dozen countries, including, in the USA, Ascent, California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Concho River Review, Iconoclast, Italian Americana,The Lyric, Main Street Rag, Poesia, and Potomac Review. His fourth full collection, titled Over Misty Plains, will be released in the UK by Indigo Dreams in late 2011/early 2012. He is the poetry editor of Private Photo Review, an international magazine of photography and short writings, the Italian Stanza Representative for the Poetry Society of London, and a featured poet in the 2006 edition of Poet’s Market.
Photo by Jorge Luis Platadiv>Isabel Zapata
Isabel Zapata is a Mexico City–born writer and editor. She is the author of the poetry books Ventanas adentro (Ediciones Urdimbre, 2002), Las noches son así (Broken English, 2018), and Una ballena es un país (Almadía, 2019) as well as the bilingual essay collection Alberca vacía / Empty Pool (Argonáutica, 2019, trans. Robin Myers). Recent poems have appeared in English translation in Waxwing, The Common, Rio Grande Review, and are forthcoming in Words Without Borders.
Ghassan Zaqtan
Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan is a novelist, editor, and the author of ten collections of poetry. His newest collection, The Silence That Remains, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. He is a two-time finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2014, 2016) and shared the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize with Fady Joudah. He lives in Ramallah.
Juli Zeh
Juli Zeh (born on 30 June 1974 in Bonn) is a German writer. Her first book was Adler und Engel (translated into English as Eagles and Angels by Christine Slenczka), which won the 2002 Deutscher Bücherpreis for best debut novel. She traveled through Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2001, which became the basis for the book Die Stille ist ein Geräusch. Her other books are Das Land der Menschen, Schilf (translated into English as Dark Matter by Christine Lo), Alles auf dem Rasen, Kleines Konversationslexikon für Haushunde, Spieltrieb, Ein Hund läuft durch die Republik and Corpus Delicti (translated into English as The Method by Sally-Ann Spencer).
Skuya Zephier
Skuya Zephier, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, was born and raised a nomad in the West and educated as a petroleum geologist. Her essay “Landmarks and Mines” appeared in conjunction with the “After Alcatraz” issue of WLT (Autumn 2019). She is currently writing and telling her family’s stories before they are lost in the wind, to time.
Moikom Zeqo
Born in Durrës, Albania, in 1949, Moikom Zeqo is a prolific author of poetry, fiction, children’s books, and monographs on history and literature. He has published more than one hundred books in his lifetime. In 1974 his third poetry collection, Meduza (published in the US as I Don’t Believe in Ghosts [BOA, 2007]), was suppressed until after the fall of Albanian communism. In 1979 Zeqo was “rehabilitated” and employed by the Archaeological Museum of Durrës and the Academy of Sciences in Tirana. In 1991 he served as Albania’s minister of culture. From 1992 to 1996 he served as a parliamentary representative in the Albanian Popular Assembly, and from 1998 to 2004 he directed the National Historical Museum in Tirana. Since then, he has worked as a journalist, art curator, and freelance writer. The US translation of his book Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015) was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation.
Zhang Huiyu
Zhang Huiyu is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Peking University. His research specializes in film and media studies, mass communication, and the social history of journalism. His publications include Visual Modernity: Representing the Historical Subject of Twentieth-Century China and The Phantom Subject: Studies of Chinese Popular Culture.
Zhang Er
Zhang Er, a Shenzhen-based Chinese poet, is the author of three poetry collections. His work has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Hindi, Swedish, and Japanese. He is editor in chief of Enclave, a poetry journal he founded in 2012. He was an invited poet at poetry events in Stockholm, Gotland, and Uppsala in 2013, and at the 37th annual French/English Poetry Festival in Paris in 2014. He was awarded a Vermont Studio Center / Henry Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry & Translation Fellowship in 2018.
Zheng Xiaoqiong
Zheng Xiaoqiong has been a migrant worker in Guangdong Province since 2001. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Shikan, Shanhua, and Renmin Wenxue, among many others. She has won multiple literary awards and attended poetry festivals all over the world. Her poems have been translated into a dozen other languages.
John Zheng
John Zheng is the author of A Way of Looking and the editor of Conversations with Dana Gioia and Conversations with Sterling Plumpp. He has published interviews in African American Review, Arkansas Review, Mississippi Quarterly, and a few other journals. He has received two artist fellowships from Mississippi Arts Commission.
Zheng Min
Zheng Min (1920–2022) was one of the most important poets from China. She taught poetry at Beijing Normal University from 1960 till retirement in 2006. Her Collected Poems appeared in 2016. Also an accomplished translator and critic, she published Contemporary American Poetry (1987) and four books of critical essays on Western philosophy and comparative poetics.
Ping Zhu
Ping Zhu is associate professor of Chinese literature at the University of Oklahoma and the acting editor in chief of the biennial literary journal Chinese Literature Today. She is the author of Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Culture. She has co-edited Maoist Laughter and Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics.
Olga Zilberbourg
Olga Zilberbourg has three books of fiction published in Russian and has published English-language fiction, essays, and book reviews in various publications. Her first collection in English, Like Water and Other Stories, is forthcoming in 2019. Raised in St. Petersburg, she now makes her home in San Francisco.
Zoran Živković
Zoran Živković (b. 1948, Belgrade, Serbia) is the author of twenty-two books of fiction published in twenty-three countries, in twenty languages. With more than one hundred foreign editions, he is one of the most translated contemporary Serbian writers. Živković’s writing was featured in the November 2011 issue of WLT.
Andrew Zubiri
Andrew Zubiri (@jadz) is a Filipino writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Consequence, Atticus Review, Ninth Letter, and the Threepenny Review. His work explores identity and the tension between home and diaspora. A former global development professional, he now works in educational technology and lives in Boston.
Photo by JEOSMdiv>Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga
Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga (b. 1971, Madrid) is a Spanish poet and author. His books of poetry—Calles para un pez luna, Cuadernos del hábito oscuro, Siete caminos para Beatriz, and Lance—are all part of his anthology Escalas (2023). As a novelist, he has published the trilogy Santo diablo, No cantaremos en tierra de extraños, and Escarcha. The recipient of several literary awards in Spain, his works have been translated into several languages.
Vikram Zutshi
Vikram Zutshi is a filmmaker, columnist, and photojournalist who divides his time between California, Latin America, and India. His last production, a feature documentary on the immigration crisis, was filmed along the US-Mexico border and broadcast globally. He is currently in postproduction on Darshan: The Living Art of India, exploring the ritual and social praxis of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist art in India and Nepal.
Rajzel Zychlinsky
Rajzel Zychlinsky (1910–2001) was born in Gombin, Poland, and her first book of poems was published to great acclaim by the Yiddish PEN Club in Warsaw in 1936. Zychlinsky survived World War II in Tatarstan and afterward moved to Paris, New York, and finally California. Her ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean.
