When we ask whether international literature can make us better travelers, who are the supposed beneficiaries?

Travel is a self-improvement project that has been sold to us as a world-improvement project.

There is a surer way for international literature to make us better tourists.

New York, New York, January 16, 2020—The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced yesterday awards totaling more than $27 million in its first funding round of fiscal year 2020, including an…

A note from the editors on the occasion of our Rojava poetry feature.

These poems display the health and vitality of a literature that has already proved to be a potent medium for self-expression, a grounds for linguistic experimentation, and an important declaration of autonomy itself.

Some of the writers here document their own trips, while others invent characters and send them on the road.

The pieces here map the translation of event into prose—the creation of true crime writing.

It all began about the time that the men and women were finishing their first drinks.

Twenty years ago, one Christmas Eve, my best friend killed his sister and threw himself off a cliff.

“Must you put on a fur when someone shouts ‘murder'?

It's not a crime to kill someone on the high seas, you know.

In my Italian translation course at Georgetown University, advanced students of Italian learn about translation theory and practice (English-Italian, and vice versa) of different genres, including newspaper…

The results of these confrontations range from triumphant to catastrophic as the boundaries between worlds dissolve.

The works we have selected challenge a monolithic view of the fragmented histories and interconnected, overlapping cultures in the Philippines.

Not enough is known about the Philippines.

Despite their specificity, these tales transcend the places that produced them and throb with a universal appeal.

Humor has that paradoxical quality of being absolutely universal while also being deeply embedded in linguistic wordplay and sociocultural zeitgeist.

I shall tell you about one of the nitwits.

We are pleased to announce that Edith Grossman will receive the 2019 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.“In a career that spans over half a century—translating, teaching…

Norway is a dream that many people carry.

We received 717 poems from 282 poets from 87 countries translated from 55 languages.

In the Antarctic in particular, the blue whale nearly died out.

I soon learned that Norwegians deliver praise in the past tense.

This year, we partnered with the Academy of American Poets for our first ever poetry in translation contest. We received 717 poems from 282 poets from 87 countries translated…

This year, among the dozen longlisters for Italy’s most important literary award, the Premio Strega, seven were women. The presence of titles written by women on the Strega longlist has never…

The Tang Dynasty poets translated by the Beat Generation poets are often associated with the totality of Chinese poetry.

In a world reimagining its cultural and political axes, Welsh-language literature gives voice to an experience more necessary and valuable now than ever.

I am old enough to remember when creative writing was something you “couldn’t teach” and was considered by the academy to be a less than legitimate area of study. (Journalism didn’t…

What brings people together isn’t language. If anything, when times are hard, shared language can deepen divisions.

All the pieces are told in the first person, lending intimacy and immediacy to the events they describe.

Now, thanks to our authors, we’re ready to step forth into the sun.

Words Without Borders Launches Poems in Translation ContestMónica de la Torre to Judge We're pleased to announce a new contest to spotlight some of the groundbreaking poets working around…

We’re pleased to welcome Susannah Greenblatt as WWB’s digital marketing and communications coordinator. Susannah is a writer, filmmaker, and translator from the Spanish, and she…

Any way you look at it, it’s this town that taught me to be ruthless.

Brazilian writer, philosopher, and activist Marcia Tiburi currently lives in Pittsburgh, where she is writer-in-residence at City of Asylum. On Saturday, May 11, she will join Scholastique Mukasonga…

The fifteenth annual PEN World Voices Festival kicks off today in New York City. From May 6–12, writers from around the world will participate in conversations, readings, translation…

Unsettlement, a lack of centeredness, manifests itself throughout each of the works in this issue.

Speculative fiction is alive and well in Italy.

Contrary to the epic, totalizing, and politically engaged narratives of the Latin American Boom, the scope of the stories here is narrow, intimate, more local than ever before.

The selection here is proposed not as a definitive list of the major Mozambican poets working today but rather a jumping-off point, a gesture toward the diversity of themes and styles to be found in the contemporary literature of Mozambique.

I would have ironed my own hands had I not needed them to iron.

For International Women’s Day, we’re celebrating women and organizations from around the globe who advocate for greater gender parity in the literary world. Through publishing and activism,…

The authors here represent a range of genres and topics in settings extending from distant planets to the very center of the earth.

Whose story gets to be told?

When I realize that I am only writing in a national language, it is precisely geography that adds to its meaning.

When you’ve always worked for a low wage, getting a higher wage is a challenge.

Writing is a post-traumatic symptom.

New York, New York, February 13, 2019—The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced today awards totaling more than $27 million in its first funding round of fiscal year 2019, including an…

These works reflect a striking range of existential challenges shaping lives across the globe.

Algerian Francophone poetry was largely outside, and in contrast to, the post-World War II movement in French poetry of disengagement from political causes.

When we think of translating humor, we may think in terms of capturing jokes.

References and Further Reading Alves, Miriam.Mulher Mat(r)iz. Belo Horizonte: Nandyala, 2011.Alves, Miriam. Entrevista. Duke, Dawn (Org.). A escritora afro-brasileira: ativismo e arte literária.…

If the literature of a country with the second largest black population worldwide (only Nigeria has a larger black population) does not include that population in its literature, one must ask which Brazil we’re speaking of when we speak of Brazilian…

What these authors share, as insiders to the Japanese language, is a firsthand perspective on a culture whose monoethnic self-image often excludes them by default.

Politicians know I’m a poet. And that poets face death when their people are oppressed.

According to Barreto himself, the aim of his crusade was to produce a type of literature that he defined as “militante,” engaging with the society’s most pressing issues and communicating these issues to a wider audience in accessible language.

Eliza Vitri Handayani reports from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, which occurred October 24–28 in Ubud, Bali.This year is the fifteenth anniversary of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival…

Renowned translator Anton Hur offers insights into the challenges facing literary translators and tips for navigating “the Valley.”

And I neither want nor can forget what I once felt from your gaze.