December 19, 2024
December 02, 2024
Authors
Find your favorite authors featured in WLT or browse the entire list.
Marlene Olin
Marlene Olin’s short stories and essays have been published in journals such as the Massachusetts Review, Catapult, PANK, and the Baltimore Review. She is the recipient of both the 2015 Rick Demarinis Fiction Award and the 2018 So to Speak Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories.
Photo: Rolando Diazdiv>Ursula Andkjær Olsen
Ursula Andkjær Olsen (b. 1970, Copenhagen) made her literary debut in 2000 and has since published nine collections of poetry. Olsen has received numerous grants and awards for her work, including the prestigious Montanaprisen for Det 3. årtusindes hjerte (Third-Millennium Heart) and the Danish Critics’ Prize for its sequel, Udgående Fartøj (Outgoing Vessel).
Deji Olukotun
Deji Olukotun is the inaugural Freedom to Write Fellow at PEN American Center. A practicing human-rights attorney, he is also a passionate fiction writer. His novel Nigerians in Space will be published by Ricochet Books this year. You can follow him on Twitter @dejiridoo or find out more at returnofthedeji.com. WLT published his Pushcart-nominated story “Home Affairs,” about a father and son attempting to penetrate the notorious Refugee Reception Office in Cape Town, in its September 2009 issue.
Kristín Ómarsdóttir
Kristín Ómarsdóttir (b. 1962) is one of Iceland’s most acclaimed living authors. She has published nine novels, eight poetry collections, seven books of short stories, and half a dozen plays and radio dramas. Her novels have been translated into many languages, and her selected poems in English, Waitress in Fall (trans. Vala Thorodds), was chosen as a poetry book of the year by the Sunday Times and the White Review. She lives in Reykjavík.
Romeo Oriogun
Romeo Oriogun (@SonOfOlokun), a Nigerian poet, is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Poetry Review, Poetry London, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, he is an alumni of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work was profiled in the Spring 2020 issue of World Literature Today.
Peter Orner
Peter Orner is the author of Love and Shame and Love, a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book, and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a novel set in Namibia and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Two books will be out in 2013, a reissue of his first book, Esther Stories, and a new story collection, Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge. Born in Chicago, Orner lives in San Francisco.
Anna Maria Ortese
Anna Maria Ortese (1914–1998) was an Italian writer of short stories, novels, and reportage. Her prolific body of work encompasses elements of neorealism and magical realism. She spent parts of the 1930s and 1940s living in Naples, and her 1953 collection Il mare non bagna Napoli documents her impressions of the postwar city.
Simon J. Ortiz
Poet, fiction, and creative nonfiction writer Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) is a retired Regents Professor at Arizona State University and editor emeritus of Red Ink journal. He is determined to express an Indigenous voice that he believes is the essence of present-day reality, conscience, culture, and sense of responsibility.
Photo by Harold Baquetdiv>Brenda Marie Osbey
Brenda Marie Osbey is a poet, essayist, and librettist working in English and French. Her six books include her collected poems, All Souls: Essential Poems (LSU Press, 2015); History and Other Poems (Time Being, 2013); and All Saints: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1997). The first peer-selected poet laureate of Louisiana (2005–2007), Osbey is a native New Orleanian.
Shauna Osborn
Shauna Osborn is an award-winning Numunuu (Comanche) / German mestiza artist, researcher, and wordsmith. Her debut poetry collection is called Arachnid Verve. She was recently named national director of the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. You can find her online at shaunamosborn.wordpress.com.
Sanya Osha
Sanya Osha is the author of several books, including Postethnophilosophy (2011), Dust, Spittle and Wind (2011), An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012), and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (expanded ed., 2021), among other publications. He works at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Ladan Osman
Ladan Osman (@OsmanLadan) is a Somali-born artist whose work is a lyric and exegetic response to problems of race, gender, displacement, and colonialism. She is the author of Exiles of Eden (2019) and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015), winner of a Sillerman First Book Prize. Her most recent collection, Exiles of Eden, is a work of poetry, photos, and experimental text. Her work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Roar, Rumpus, among others. Osman’s writing has been translated into over ten languages. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
Niyi Osundare
Nigerian poet, playwright, essayist, and scholar Niyi Osundare has authored eighteen books of poetry, two books of selected poems, four plays, two books of essays, and numerous scholarly articles and reviews. Among his many prizes are the Tchicaya U Tam’si Award for African Poetry (generally regarded as Africa’s highest poetry prize) and the Fonlon/Nichols Award for “excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa.” Former professor and chair of the English Department, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, he is currently Distinguished Professor of English, University of New Orleans.
Jamal Ouariachi
Dutch writer Jamal Ouariachi won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2017 for his novel A Hunger, which is currently being translated into ten different languages.
Kyrié Eleison Owen
Kyrié Eleison Owen is an Indigenous writer with an MFA in creative writing, nonfiction, from University of California Riverside and a BA in creative writing from University of Cincinnati. She has words in Lunch Ticket, The Nasiona, Boshemia, and Waxing & Waning, among other literary journals, and has shared her work onstage at True Theatre.
© Bernd Hartungdiv>Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (b. 1968) is the author of the novel Dust, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. Winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, she has also received an Iowa Writers’ Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications, and she has been a TEDx Nairobi speaker and a Lannan Foundation resident. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya. Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House
Nilay Özer
An Istanbul-born and raised poet, Nilay Özer received her PhD from Bilkent University and teaches Turkish, creative writing, and modern Turkish literature at major universities in Istanbul. Following her early poems published in various literary magazines, Ozer’s first poetry volume, Zamana Dağılan Nar (Pomegranate scattered across time) appeared in 1999. Her second book, Ol! (Be!), received the Cemal Süreya Poetry Award in 2004. Her most recent poetry volume, Korkuluklara Giysi Yardımı (Clothes-drive for scarecrows), was published in 2015.
Toti O’Brien
Toti O’Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. Born in Rome, living in Los Angeles, she is an artist, musician, and dancer. She is the author of Other Maidens (BlazeVOX, 2020) and An Alphabet of Birds (Moonrise Press, 2020).
Laurence O’Dwyer
Laurence O’Dwyer is a graduate of University College Cork and holds a PhD in paradigms of memory formation from Trinity College Dublin. In 2017 he received a MacDowell Fellowship. In 2016 he won the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry. He has also won a Hennessy New Irish Writing Award and been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for Poetry. His brain-imaging research in autism and Alzheimer’s disease has been published in a range of academic journals, and his science journalism appears in the Guardian and the Irish Medical Times. In 2016 he devoted his time to writing and long-distance mountain running, mostly in the Pyrenees. Current projects include a collaboration with Asylum Productions for a theater performance that merges poetry and an academic lecture about memory and neuroscience. He also collaborates with Swedish indie game developer Macalaus, contributing texts for a game about space-travel and the search for home.
Tess O’Dwyer
Tess O’Dwyer is a translator, editor, and arts consultant in New York City. She and Frederick Luis Aldama co-edited Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi (2020), with a foreword by Ilan Stavans. She also translated Empire of Dreams (1994), by Giannina Braschi, and Martin Rivas (2000), by Alberto Blest Gana. She is a board member of the Academy of American Poets.
Photo: Michael Markl div>Mandakini Pachauri
Mandakini Pachauri is an Indian poet writing in English. She lives in Vienna and is currently pursuing the Pan-European MFA at Cedar Crest College.
Ben Packham
Ben Packham lives in Sydney, Australia, working as an accountant. In his spare time, he indulges his hobbies of photography, woodworking, and riding his motorbike. He spent a year living and working in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, with the United Nations between 2011 and 2012.
Deena Padayachee
Deena Padayachee is a native of Durban, South Africa, and works as a medical doctor in an Apartheid-era township in the city. During Apartheid, when the publishing of such tales was virtually impossible in the mainstream South African magazines, his short stories were published mainly in New York (Short Story International). During Apartheid, he published a book of prose poems called A Voice from the Cauldron (1987). His prizewinning book, What’s Love Got to Do with It? was prescribed for Kwa Zulu Natal matric students in 2004. His short stories have been widely anthologized.
Alexandra Pagán Vélez
Alexandra Pagán Vélez is the author of the story collections El diccionario y el Capitán (2010), Amargo (2014, 2018), Eneida y Martín: dos coquíes muy distintos (2018), Horror-REAL (2017, 2020), and Relatos de domingos (2014). She has also published the poetry collections Del Alzheimer y otros demonios (2014) and Cuando era niña hablaba como niña (2014).
