Amaia Gabantxo is a writer, flamenco singer, and literary translator specializing in Basque literature. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago, and performs regularly in venues all over the city. She is the most prolific translator of Basque literature into English to date, as well as a pioneer in the field, and has received multiple awards for her work, most recently, the OMI Writers Translation Lab award, a Mellon Fellowship for Arts and Scholarship, and a yearlong artist-in-residence award at the Cervantes Institute in Chicago. She has published and performed on both sides of the Atlantic: in Ireland and Great Britain, the countries in which she carried out her university education, and in the US, where she currently lives.

Forthcoming literary translations in 2017 include Twist by Harkaitz Cano for Archipelago Books in NY, A Glass Eye by Miren Agur Meabe for Parthian Books in the UK, and two seminal collections by the father of modern Basque poetry, Gabriel Aresti, Rock & Core and Downhill, for the University of Nevada Press.

She is currently writing a “novel in flamenco form,” a work structured around a chain of flamenco songs, a hybrid that is both literary and performative.

Photograph: Casey Mitchell