Vibhuti Patel (India/US, Nonfiction) September 9-29
Vibhuti is an Indian-born American journalist who wrote on arts and culture for Newsweek International for 30 years, freelanced for many major Indian and American publications, and now writes for The Wall St. Journal. She taught English Literature at Bombay University and Contemporary Indian Fiction at the U.N. International School, the New School University, the 92nd St. Y, the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and the Virginia Commonwealth University in Doha, Qatar. Her book Mrs. Kennedy Goes Abroad was published by Artisan/Workman in English and by Gallimard in French. She is finishing a memoir on her life in America.
Ayman Sikseck (Israel, Fiction) September 9-October 6
Ayman is a Palestinian author born in Israel. He is a columnist, literary critic, and a graduate of comparative literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His debut novel, To Jaffa, grew out of short stories that received numerous awards, including the Ha’aretz short story competition. He is also the co-editor of The Palestinian Nakba in Hebrew Poetry, 1948-1958, a breakthrough anthology published in 2009.
Lukas Hammerstein (Germany, Fiction/Theater) September 9-October 6
Lukas studied Law and Philosophy. He has worked as a lawyer and journalist, living in Rome, Vienna, and now in Munich, Germany. He has several published novels, most recently Wo wirst du sein. On December 11 there will be the world premiered for his play Damals wurde es irgendwie heller at Staatsschauspiel Nürnberg. www.lukashammerstein.de
Pascale Kramer (Switzerland, Fiction) September 9-October 6
Pascale was born in Geneva but current lives and works in Paris as a freelance copyrighter. She has published 11 novels including Les Vivants, translated into English by Tamsin Black (University Nebraska Press), and Un homme ébranlé, published in 2011. She has been awarded various prizes, including the Prix Shiller (Switzerland) and the Prix du Roman de la Société des gens de lettres (France) in 2010. (photo by Claudine Goujon)
Devibharathi (India, Fiction/Nonfiction/Theater) September 10-October 6
Nallamuthu Rajasekaran (pen name Devibharathi) is a writer of short stories, plays, and essays on literature, art, cinema, environment and politics. One of his plays was selected as the best 1994 Tamil-language play by the Central Sangeeth Nadak Academy, a state-owned organization for theater and music. He is also interested in Tamil folk arts and has organized two major workshops in his hometown in 2002 and 2008. He is working on his first a novel called Noyyal. Currently he serves as Executive Editor of Kalachuvadu, a well-known Tamil-language literary magazine.
Reese Okyong Kwon (US/Korea, Fiction) September 16-October 6
Reese's stories are published or forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Southern Review, Sun Magazine, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony, and Hedgebrook. In addition, she has been named one of Narrative’s “30 Below 30” writers. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, and has lived for most of her life in the United States. She is working on a novel.
Sheba Karim (US, Fiction) September 23-October 20
Sheba’s young adult novel, Skunk Girl, about a Pakistani-American girl coming of age in 1990’s upstate New York, was published in the Denmark, India, Italy, Sweden, and the United States. Two of her short stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a 2009-2010 Fulbright-Nehru scholar. For the past two years, she has been based in India, researching and writing a historical fiction novel set in 13th century Delhi.
Sabrina Janesch (Germany, Fiction) September 30-October 26
Sabrina was born in Gifhorn, Germany. Her first novel Katzenberge (Cat Mountains), gained the Mara-Cassens-Prize for the best German language debut. Regularly, She publishes short stories in literary anthologies and magazines. Sabrina also works as a freelance journalist for newspapers in Germany and Switzerland. Currently, she is working on her second novel, which will be published in 2012.
Anna Mioni (Italy, Translation) September 30-October 27
Anna is a literary translator, editor and scout. Since 1997 she has translated more than fifty novels and non-fiction books from authors including Lester Bangs, Sam Lipsyte, Tom McCarthy, Jon McGregor, John O’Brien, and Luc Sante. She has worked as an in-house editor for two publishing houses. Anna has also been shortlisted twice for the Premio Monselice prize for translators. She teaches literary translation in classrooms and online and occasionally writes for newspapers and reviews. While at Ledig House she will be translating C by Tom McCarthy. www.annamioni.it (photo by Stefano Sandonnini)
Paul Olchváry (US, Translation) October 7-20
Paul has translated numerous books from Hungarian, including Vilmos Kondor’s Budapest Noir, György Dragomán’s The White King, and Ferenc Barnás’s The Ninth. His translations have also appeared in the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Hungarian Quarterly. His honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN American Center. Born in America to Hungarian parents, he lived in Hungary for years and today resides chiefly in North Adams, Massachusetts.
Ole Steen Hansen (Demark, Fiction/Nonfiction/Translation) October 7-November 3
Steen is a writer, photographer, and translator working on books for children and adults. His main themes have been found in 20th Century history and aviation. In recent years, he has been focused on new works exploring the boundaries between fact and fiction. His time at Ledig House will be spent turning many months of research and interviews about life, escape and survival into a manuscript.
András Maros (Hungary, Theater/Fiction) October 7-Novemeber 3
András is a writer and playwright form Budapest. He is the author of three works of fiction: Lemonade (2008), I Wanna Hear Names: Stories (2003), and Pouffe (2001). His new book is coming out in spring of 2012. He is also a playwright and short story writer, publishing more than 200 shorter works in literary publications in Hungarian national journals, weeklies and dailies. At Ledig House, he’ll be working on his first nonfiction book: a “tennis memoir”. www.andrasmaros.com
Francesc Serés (Catalonia, Nonfiction/Fiction) October 7-Novemeber 3
Francesc has been lecturer of Antique and Medieval Art History at the Pompeu Fabra University. In 2003 under the title On Manure and Marble, he published the trilogy he had been working on up until then: The Earth’s Womb (2000), The Tree Without a Trunk (2001) and A Lead Language (2002). The trilogy looks to slowly measure the evolution experienced by farmers from western Catalonia over the past decades with the will to testify to social transformations experienced by Catalonia. He has won, among other awards, the Octavi Pellissa Prize for literary projects, the Ciutat de Lleida Prize and the National Prize for Literature.
Erga Netz (Netherlands, Fiction) October 13-November 18
Erga was born in Israel, but now she’s a Dutch citizen, living and working in Amsterdam. Some 30 years ago, the Israeli publishing house Massada published her ‘how to’ book The art of Macramé. Since that time, while her literary dreams were hatching, she produced TV documentaries and short drama films, together with the director Izzy Abrahami. In the last couple of years she started directing documentary films for television and producing theater plays. At Ledig House she’s working on her first novel.
Catherine Marshall (South Africa, Fiction/Nonfiction) October 14 – November 11
Catherine has worked as a broadcast, print and online journalist in her homeland, South Africa, and in Australia, where she has lived for the past decade. A columnist, travel writer and migrant, she has an abiding interest in cross-cultural interaction, global movement, refugee issues and dislocation—themes which will form the focal core of her first novel, on which she is currently working.
Theresa Coulter (US, Theater/Nonfiction) October 21-November 18
Theresa works as a freelance writer and illustrator in New York City. She has had the honor of writing scripts for both Tina Fey and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, only one of whom remarked, "This girl is funny." She has been a fellow at Hedgebrook and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir Something Pretty Inside and the picture book Frog Heaven.
Chika Unigwe (Nigeria/Belgium, Fiction) October 21-November 18
Chika was born and raised in Enugu, Nigeria. She is the author of On Black Sisters Street (available in the US from Random House.) She has published extensively in journals and anthologies and has won several literary awards. She has been a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center, and a UNESCO-Aschberg fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Center. She lives and works in Turnhout, Belgium.
Mads Mygind (Denmark, Poetry) October 21-November 18
Mads has published in several Scandinavian periodicals. Last year he published a pamphlet of poems, Tilbage er et sart pulver af oprør, and in February 2011 he debuted with the critically acclaimed collection of poems, Før vi har set os omkring. He has attended the University in his home tome of Aarhus for six years, studying Nordic Language and Literature, as well as Visual Culture. Mads arranges poetry readings, and in 2007 he founded a poetry festival “Verbale Pupiller” (“Verbal Pupils”). He teaches creative writing at schools, and is currently working on a new collection of poetry.
Toni Press-Coffman (US, Theater) October 28-November 18
Toni has written 20 plays, which have been produced throughout the country, and has had work developed at the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, the Sundance Institute, Midwest Professional Playwrights Laboratory, and Minneapolis' Playwrights Center. She has taught playwrights at the undergraduate and graduate levels as well as youth of all ages through a Tucson Pima Arts Council Residency and the Borderlands Theater’s Coyote y Culebra Project. She is a founding member of Tucson’s Winding Road Theater Ensemble.
