Carmen Bugan, George Orwell Prize Fellow, is an award-winning poet and writer who explores the expressions of historical and political upheaval in literature. She is the author of ten books including poetry, memoir, and criticism, and some of her work has been translated into Swedish, Polish, Italian, and Chinese. Tristia is her fifth collection published by Shearmsan Books. Bugan's monograph, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013/Routledge, 2020), has received international praise. Her most recent book of essays on politics and poetics, Poetry and the Language of Oppression (Oxford University Press, 2021), dealt with Cold War surveillance and considered the wider perspectives on writing in turbulent times; it was named an "essential book for writers" by Poets and Writers. Time Being (Shearsman, 2022), her most recent collection of poems, reflected on the pandemic and the changed sense of time. Her memoir, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (Picador/ Graywolf, 2012), was winner of the Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, a finalist in the George Orwell Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was serialized as the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, as well as being a Waterstone's Book Club Choice. Bugan's new and selected poems, Lilies from America (Shearsman, 2019) received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Carmen Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, and held teaching posts at New York University Abu Dhabi, Stony Brook University, University of Fribourg, and Oxford University, where she was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature. Other fellowships and grants include Arts Council England and Hawthornden Fellowship.
