The Literary Lounge

Sudeep Sen’s [www.sudeepsen.org] prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), and Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury). He has edited influential anthologies, including: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor), World English Poetry, and Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi). Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation;, Blue Nude: Ekphrasis & New Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) and The Whispering Anklets are forthcoming. Sen’s works have been translated into over 25 languages. His words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Herald, Poetry Review, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Indian Express, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on bbc, pbs, cnn ibn, ndtv, air & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Leela: An Erotic Play of Verse and Art (Collins), Indian Love Poems (Knopf/Random House/Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell), and Name me a Word (Yale). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS, editor of Atlas, and currently the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Museo Camera. Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature.”

Lisa Ducasse is a spoken word artist, singer and songwriter from Mauritius now living in Paris. She released her first poetry collection, Midnight Sunburn, in April 2017, and her first EP, Louvoie, in September 2018. She writes in French and in English, her two native languages, and her work mostly stems from and builds around the – sometimes lived, sometimes imagined – life of a traveler and the various homes one finds through encounters, moments, and in places all around the world. Her songs recently caught the attention of French singer Zazie, for whom she opened at the Olympia in November 2019. Her second poetry collection, called House of Sometimes, is scheduled to be released in the first half of 2021.

Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya in 1964. He is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Fugitive Atlas, forthcoming in October from Graywolf Press. Mattawa is the translator of several books of contemporary Arabic poetry, and co-editor of three anthologies of Arab American literature. He teaches at the University of Michigan and edits Michigan Quarterly Review.

Pierre Joris has moved between Europe, the US & North Africa for some 55 years now, publishing as many books of poetry, essays, translations and anthologies — most recently Fox-trails, -tales & -trots (poems & proses, Black Fountain Press); Microliths: Posthumous Prose of Paul Celan (Contra Mundum Press) & A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly (co-edited with Peter Cockelbergh & Joel Newberger, CMP), & Arabia (not so) Deserta (Essays, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2019); & earlier Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis (CMP 2018), and The Book of U (poems, with Nicole Peyrafitte, Editions Simoncini 2017). Forthcoming in 2020 : Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry by Paul Celan (FSG, October 2020). When not on the road, he lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia praticienne Nicole Peyrafitte.

Eric Ngalle Charles is a Cameroon-born Wales based writer, poet, playwright, actor, and activist. He is currently a postgraduate student in taught at Swansea University. Following the publication last year of his autobiography, I, Eric Ngalle, https://www.parthianbooks.com/products/i-eric-ngalle-a-migrant
 Eric was selected by Jackie Kay as one of the UK’s top ten BAME writers https://g.co/kgs/BPVwgX: