Mazen KerbajMazen Kerbaj

Mazen Kerbaj was born in 1975 in Beirut and has lived there since. His main activities are comics, painting and music. In March 2000 he published Journal 1999, a diary in graphic format. Since then he has self-published eight other books and many short stories. Also in 2000, he played his first concert, in the Strike's pub in Beirut. This concert, a duo with Lebanese sax player Christine Sehnaoui, was probably the first improvised music concert in the Middle East. In 2001, together with guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui , he created the MILL association, which curates IRTIJAL, an annual international festival for free music in Beirut, as well as various concerts and events. In August 2002, together with Sharif Sehnaoui and double bass player Raed Yassine, he recorded the album A, published by La CD-Thèque, Beirut. After meeting Franz Hautzinger by chance in Lebanon in February 2003, they played in duo in Beirut and in Paris and in trio with Japanese laptop player Taku Unami at the IRTIJAL 2003 festival. Then they were joined by Sharif Sehnaoui and Helge Hinteregger to form Oriental Space, a quartet that played in Nickelsdorf, Berlin, Vienna and Klagenfurt. A recording of this group is avilable on the Austrian label aRtonal, and Abu Tarek, a recording of the duo Hautzinger/Kerbaj, is available on the Portugese label Creative Sources. In 2005, Kerbaj released two new albums on the new Lebanese label Al Maslakh (The Slaughterhouse), one solo and the other with the Rouba3i quartet. From 2000 to the present, Mazen Kerbaj has played solo and in various groups in venues in Lebanon, Syria, France, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, UK, and the USA. His website is www.kerbaj.com.

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The winner of the John Dryden Translation prize, Edward Gauvin (edwardgauvin.com/blog) has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, the Fulbright Foundation, the Centre National du Livre, and the American Literary Translators' Association. His volume of Georges-Olivier Chāteaureynaud’s selected stories, A Life on Paper (Small Beer, 2010), won the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award and was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Other publications have appeared in Tin House, Subtropics, The Harvard Review, The Southern Review, AGNI Online, and PEN America. He translates comics for Top Shelf, Archaia, and Lerner.

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