Western Europe

Gertrud Kolmar, born Gertrud Chodziesner in Berlin in December 1894, was a German Jewish poet and writer. Her surviving works include 450 poems, three plays, and two short stories. Kolmar drew inspiration ...

Elizabeth Sarah Coles (she/her) is the author of Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist (Oxford University Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Her other honors include a T.R. Henn...

Luftwerk Studio was founded by Chicago-based artists Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero. A combination of the German words luft (meaning “air”) and werk (meaning “work” or “artwork”), the name emphasizes both...

Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. The recipient of the 2022 Poetry International Prize and the 2016 George Bogin Memorial...

Marissa Davis (she/her) is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky. Davis is the winner of a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, and in 2023, she received an Emerging Translator ...

Charles Baudelaire is one of the most compelling poets of the 19th century. While Baudelaire’s contemporary Victor Hugo is generally—and sometimes regretfully—acknowledged as the greatest of 19th-century French...

German dramatist August Stramm is now considered one of the leading avant-garde writers of his era, though he struggled for literary recognition for most of his career and did not live to see most of his work...

French poet, philosopher, and journalist Charles Péguy grew up poor in Orléans, France. He combined fervent Catholicism with socialist politics to create a body of work unlike any other. As a Twentieth-Century...

Born in Canada, poet and literary scholar Jonathan Locke Hart earned a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He has taught literary theory, intellectual...

Poet Jacques Prevert was born was born on Feburary 4, 1900, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, near Paris. His collections of poetry include Paroles (Words) (1946), Spectacle (1951), La Pluie et le beau temps (...

Richard Wright is recognized as one of the preeminent novelists and essayists of the 20th century. He is most famous for writings depicting the harsh realities of life for Black Americans in the Jim Crow–era...

Philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous is widely considered one of the preeminent French intellectuals writing under the sign of deconstruction. A close friend of Jacques Derrida, Cixous pioneered écriture feminine...

Blaise Cendrars was born Frédéric Louis Sauser in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, to a Swiss father and a Scottish mother. Cendrars was famous for self-mythologizing, and details of his childhood vary: in ...

Poet, actor, and literary translator Hélène Cardona was born in Paris and raised all over Europe before settling in the United States. She earned her MA in American literature from the Sorbonne, where she ...

Gérard de Nerval is the pen name of French Romantic poet and author Gérard Labrunie, who was born in Paris. He was the son of an army doctor and was raised by his great-uncle in the Mortefontaine countryside...

Romanian and French poet, critic, and philosopher Benjamin Fondane was a major figure in Jewish existentialism. Known primarily as a symbolist and surrealist, Fondane began his career in 1914 when he was a...

Hellmut (Peter) Huchel studied literature and philosophy in Berlin before changing his first name to Peter in 1930. Frequently writing poems and radio plays, Huchel quickly established himself as a major voice...

Heinrich Heine was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, to assimilated Jewish parents. Heine’s uncle was a powerful banker who supported Heine for much of his life, only to write him out of his will. Heine attended...

Günter Grass is widely considered one of Germany’s most important postwar writers and intellectuals. He was born and raised in Danzig, then known as “the Free City of Danzig”; his parents fled their home in...

French poet Raymond Roussel is frequently described as one of 20th-century literature’s most eccentric writers. His work is notable for its inscrutable surfaces and extreme density; its wealth of puns, double...