Eastern Europe

Adam WIEDEMANN (poet, literary and music critic, fiction writer; b. 1967, Poland) made his literary debut in 1996 with A Small Male, a collection of poems; several publications quickly followed. Animal Fables, a volume of rhyming poems, was published in 1997, and in 1998, Wiedemann brought forth a collection of short stories, The Omnipresence of Order , which was nominated for the Nike prize, Poland's most prestigious literary award.

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Natalya VOROZHBIT (playwright, journalist; b. 1975, USSR; lives in Russia) is the author of six plays, including ãThe Lives of Simple People,ä produced in Kiev, and published in her native Ukraine; and ãGalka Motalka,ä to be published in the Moscow journal Contemporary Drama . She has worked as a journalist, an editor, and in television. She was also a contributor to ãOld People: Plans for the Future,ä a documentary play project. Her participation was made possible by the Trust for Mutual Understanding Foundation.

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Aleksey Nikolayevich VARLAMOV (fiction writer, Russia; born in Moscow, 1963) is assistant professor of Russian literature at Moscow State University, and is considered one of the most interesting contemporary writers in Russia. Still in his early thirties, has has already received considerable recognition in Russia's literary circles; he was a winner of the Anti-Booker Prize in 1995 and received awards from the Moscow magazine Oktyabr (October) and from the German club Lege Artis e V.

Aleksandr Mikhaylovich ULANOV (poet, writer, critic, translator; b. 1963, USSR; lives in Russia) earned a Ph.D. in engineering from Samara State Aerospace University, where he is currently an associate professor of aircraft engine design. Although he does not consider writing to be his principal occupation, he is extremely active in the Russian literary scene. Ulanov has over 250 publications to his credit, including works of poetry, short fiction, book reviews, articles on modern Russian literature, and translation works.

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Bibliography: 

Ulanov_Alexander_bib.pdf

Lev USYSKIN contributes regularly to magazines and literary journals in Russia. His short novel Frunze Narratives was nominated in 1998 for the Russian Booker Prize. Twice in 2001, he won first place in the “Prose” category of the literary Internet competition “Ulov." He has published one book of poems, A Road to Uchsumabad (1995) and a collection of short stories, Nurse Angela (2005). He lives in Sankt Petersburg and participates courtesy of the Open World Program.

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Bibliography: 

IWP2006_lev_usyskin_bib.pdf

Gábor T. SZÁNTÓ ( poet and fiction writer; Hungary b. 1966, Budapest) belongs to the third generation of postwar Jewish Hungarian writers, who came of age after the period of silence about Jewishness that characterized the experience of their parents' generation. Szántó has a degree in political science and jurisprudence from Eötvös Loránd University and is editor in chief of the Jewish cultural monthly Szombat, founded in 1989. He published his first volume of stories, A tizedik ember (The tenth man), in 1995.

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Adriana SZYMANSKA (poet, Poland; born in Torun, 1943) is a major Polish poet and a reviewer for the monthly Przeglad Powszechny. She is a graduate of the Nicolaus Copernicus University. Following her literary debut in 1969 with the collection Everyday Skies, she published six books of poetry; the most recent, Kamien przydrozny ('A Roadside Stone', 1993) came out of a publishing house that produced only two books of poetry that year: hers and Zbiegniew Herbert's.

Piotr SOMMER is a poet, critic, and editor of the monthly Literatura na _wiecie. He has translated the works of John Ashbery, John Berryman, Seamus Heaney, and numerous other American and Anglo-Irish poets, while many of his own poems, translations, and critical works have appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, Ploughshares, and the Times Literary Supplement. A collection, Things to Translate and Other Poems (1991), is available in English. His most recent book is Piosenka pasterska (1999).

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Dariusz SOSNICKI (poet, Poland; born 1969, Kalisz) is editor at Empiz Publishers, Poznan. He has received several prestigious literary awards; his first poetry collection was honored as the "Best Debut" book of 1994. Mr. Sosnicki's second collection is described as "a weather-and-soul report," and he is regarded as a representative voice of his generation. His poetry and literary criticism are well anthologized; they are translated in Czech, English, and Slovenian, and have appeared in such journals as the Chicagi Review issue on New Polish Writing (vol.

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Piotr SLIWINSKI (poet, essayist, literary historian, Poland; born 1962, Ostrow) is assistant professor of Polish philology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, and a literary critic and commentator for the most prestigious Polish cultural magazines. He also provides regular commentary over the Polish national radio and television. Mr. Sliwinski was a founder and editor-in-chief of the literary monthly Format.