Topics discussed in this interview: Watta’s life and work. Early life in a nomadic family, role of mother in his early education; dispatch to France and Belgium for studies; beginnings of writing (poetry) as a way of processing exile; movement...
Topics discussed: above all, Kahora’s work with and for the journal KWANI? (aesthetic and political decisions; funding; collaboration and practice of publishing; finding stories in the rapidly changing situation in east and south Africa). ...
Topics discussed: the author’s work, both academic (at the University of Mauritius, and at Cambridge, UK) and as a fiction writer; his assorted professions, the evolution of his philosophical views, from phenomenology to African philosophy. ...
Farangis Siahpour (Iran) was a 2010 participant in the International Writing Program. In this interview she discusses her time at Iowa during the residency, her experience working with the other writers, and the professional and personal...
Vivienne Plumb discusses being a contemporary playwright in New Zealand, with a particular focus on the Maori renaissance in New Zealand theater. Maxim Kurochkin talks about the two "gears" required to be a playwright, and how forgetting to switch...
Beyond describing the necessary qualities in translating poetry--"honesty, musical ears, investigating for the right things behind things"--Nadia Abduljabbar's talk goes into the difficulties of translating cultural experiences and expectations...
Kenyan author and 2010 IWP resident, Billy Kahora, speaks about his influences in writing, his process and experiences of living in Iowa City. He also discusses a story he has been working on for 6 years about his experiences while living in Cape...
Elena Bossi's discussion of "Writing as Philosophy and Craft" focuses on pseudonymity in fiction, titling her talk "The Names of the Other." Chris Chryssopoulos recalls philosophies of Jorge Luis Borges, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but...
Welsh author Fflur Dafydd discusses the difference between expression in Welsh and English, contrasting the often euphemistic nature of Welsh with the more straightforward character of English. She then gives examples of how a novel she wrote in...
Ameena Hussein says "poetry is the making of experience," and relates a story of being asked why she wrote about the suffering of animals rather than the suffering of humans. For her, seeing the pain of aging and imprisonment in three monkeys...
Milosz Biedrzycki's talk, titled "Jan Kochanowski: Across the Languages, Beyond the Boundaries," discusses the 16th-century poet, who wrote in Polish and Latin, and his centuries-long impact on Polish poetry. Andrea Hirata's talk, "Translating...
UI Professor Emerita Linda Kerber will introduce panelists at the first ICPL panel of the 2012 residency, "Spectral Gender."
The roles that men and women may play within a society have been a fertile literary ground for millennia. In an...
Past the blank screen or the white rectangle of paper, some writers' work depends upon, is moored in, a very precise place, whether an ideal physical setting or a seminal inner landscape. A pen draws a place in words. What kinds of landscapes do...
Editors and writers discuss the value of the Internet as a tool of dissemination, a locus of literary community, and a potential engine for (or roadblock to) "world literature."