Please join us for our annual IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series! This week’s event features IWP Residents Nisrine Mbarki Ben Ayad (Netherlands), Nina Dragičević (Slovenia), and Hidayat Nordin (Singapore). They will be accompanied by Iowa Literary Translation MFA candidate Zubair Siddiqui.
Nisrine Mbarki Ben Ayad (she/her), the Poet Laureate of the Netherlands (2026–2027), is an Amsterdam based Dutch Moroccan versatile multilingual writer, poet, literary translator, and programmer. Her work spans poetry, fiction, theatre, and literary translation. Rooted in Dutch, Arabic, and Tamazight, and fluent in English and French, she operates across multiple literary contexts. As a literary translator, she primarily translates female voices from Arabic and English into Dutch. In January 2022, she debuted with her poetry collection Oeverloos (Shoreless). The collection was nominated for the C. Buddingh’ Prize for best poetry debut and the prestigious Herman de Coninck Prize. Her debut novel Kookpunt (Boiling Point) was published in 2025. In addition to her literary practice, Mbarki collaborates with various international literature festivals as curator and serves as an active member of several literary organizations, juries, and boards.
Nina Dragičević is a poet, writer, sound artist, and sociologist, the author of nine volumes of poetry, essays, and theory, as well as numerous sound-poetry compositions and installations. Known for a distinct formal and stylistic hybridity, linguistic precision, and an articulated queer and feminist stance, her work has been characterised by critics as “striking,” “pioneering,” and “majestic,” as “strong, powerful poetry that deserves a lot of attention.” Dragičević is the recipient of the Cankar Award 2026, the 2025 Lastovka Award, the 2023 Werner Düttmann Fellowship (Akademie der Künste, Berlin), the 2023 Dr Ana Mayer Kansky Award (University of Ljubljana), the 2021 Jenko Award, the 2020 Župančič Award, two 2018 Knight of Poetry Awards, and was a 2018 Palma Ars Acustica finalist. She was nominated by Ljubljana City of Literature.
Hidayat Nordin is a Singaporean writer, theatre director, and cultural practitioner working across fiction, poetry, performance, and film in Malay and English. In 2025, he won the Golden Point Award — Singapore's most prestigious literary prize — taking both First Prize and Honourable Mention in short fiction in the same year. He was appointed Duta Bahasa (Malay Language Ambassador) by MBMS in 2025, in recognition of his sustained contribution to the Malay language and literary arts in Singapore. His poetry has appeared in publications across Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia, including a solo collection, Optimis (2020), supported by the National Arts Council. He is the founder and Artistic Director of Aras Theatre and co-founder of Meja Conteng, a writers' collective that has produced three publications and a nationwide poetry competition since its founding in 2024. A practitioner of dikir barat — a Malay oral performance tradition of call and response — he has also represented Singapore internationally at literary festivals in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Perak.
Zubair Ibrahim Siddiqui is a poet and translator from Karachi, Pakistan. They received an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Their poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Diode, and Frozen Sea among others.