Carmen Bugan

Carmen Bugan (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Time Being (Shearsman Books, 2022), Crossing the Carpathians (Carcanet Press, 2004), The House of Straw (Shearsman Books, 2014), and Releasing the Porcelain Birds (Shearsman Books, 2016). Lilies from America: New and Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2019) received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. A selection of Bugan’s poetry and prose was translated into Italian in the bilingual edition On the Side of Forgetting/Sulla Soglia Della Dimenticanza (Edizioni Kolibris, 2015).

Bugan is the author of Poetry and the Language of Oppression: Essays on Politics and Poetics (Oxford University Press, 2021) and the memoir Burying the Typewriter (Graywolf Press, 2015), winner of the Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize and a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Burying the Typewriter was translated into several languages, earned high praise for its evocation of communist-era Romania, and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Waterstones Book Club Choice. The BBC documentary The Man Who Went Looking for Freedom was based on Bugan’s memoir.

Bugan is the author of the critical study Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile (Legenda, 2013). She has taught at Oxford University and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and was a Wolfson College Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Oxford and a Hawthornden Fellow. In 2017, she was named a George Orwell Prize Fellow. 

Bugan was born in Romania and immigrated to the United States in 1989. She earned a BA from the University of Michigan; an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, UK; and a Master of Studies and a PhD, both in English literature, from Oxford University, UK. Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan. She teaches at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City and at Stony Brook University, Long Island.