Carmen Bugan

Carmen Bugan is an award winning author whose work has received international praise. She was born in Romania in 1970 and emigrated to the US with her family in 1989. Her publications include the internationally acclaimed memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (Picador, UK/ Graywolf, USA): the American edition of this book won the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist in the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, while the English edition was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Waterstones Book Club Choice, and was shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing. She is also the author of several poetry collections, including Releasing the Porcelain Birds: Poems After Surveillance, The House of Straw, and Crossing the Carpathians (Oxford Poets/Carcanet), and a critical study on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile (Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge). Her books have been translated into Italian, Polish, and Swedish. She is a regular reviewer for Harvard Review Online. Her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, will be published in 2021 by Oxford University Press, UK.

Bugan has received a grant from the Arts Council England, was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford University, Fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland, and is a Fellow of the George Orwell Prize. In 2018 she was the Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan. Carmen has a doctorate in English Literature from Balliol College, Oxford University. Her selected poems, Lilies from America, was published in September 2019 and won a Poetry Society Special Commendation. She teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in Manhattan.