PEN World Voices Tour

Daniel Orozco

Daniel Orozco’s stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, as well as in publications such as Harper’s Magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, and Story Quarterly. He was awarded a 2006 NEA fellowship in fiction, and was a finalist for a 2006 National Magazine Award in fiction. A former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho.

Photo Credit: Krysta Ficca

Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1971. She is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read female writer in Turkey. Critics have acclaimed her as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature in both Turkish and English. Her novels include The Bastard of Istanbul and her recent memoir, Black Milk. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. She is married with two children, and divides her time between London and Istanbul.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Jonas Hassen Khemiri, born in 1978, has a Tunisian father and a Swedish mother. He grew up in Stockholm, studied literature in Paris, and was an intern at the United Nations. In 2003, his novel One Eye Red was published to enormous acclaim and received the Borås Tidning Award in 2004 for best literary debut, Sweden’s most illustrious award for a first book.Montecore was awarded Sweden’s highest honor for a young novelist, the PO Enquist Literary Prize, in 2006. Khemiri lives in Stockholm.

Photo Credit: Leif Hansen

Leila Aboulela

Leila Aboulela won the first Caine Prize for African Writing. Leila is the author of two other novels: The Translator, one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, and Minaret – both long-listed for the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award. Her collection of short stories Coloured Lights was short-listed for the Macmillan Silver PEN Award. Leila’s work has been translated into twelve languages and included in publications such as Granta, The Washington Post, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. BBC Radio has adapted her work extensively and broadcast a number of her plays including The Mystic Life and the historical drama The Lion of Chechnya. The five-part radio serialization of The Translator was short-listed for RIMA (Race In the Media Award). Leila grew up in Khartoum, lived much of her adult life in Scotland, and now lives in Doha.     

Photo Credit: Vaida V. Naim

Richard Hoffman

Richard Hoffman is author of the memoir Half the House, and three poetry collections: Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club, and Emblem. A fiction writer as well, his Interference & Other Stories was published in 2009. Past chair of PEN New England, he is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College.

Photo Credit: Tom Fitzsimmons