Dr. Carmen Bugan was born in 1970 in Romania and has since lived in the US, Ireland, England, and France. She is the author of six collections of poems: Crossing the Carpathians (Oxford Poets/Carcanet), The House of Straw (Shearsman), Releasing the Porcelain Birds (Shearsman), Lilies from America (Shearsman), Time Being (Shearsman), and Tristia (Shearsman) as well as the memoir Burying the Typewriter (Picador/Macmillan), which has been translated into several languages, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, was a Waterstones Book Club Choice, and has brought her international praise. The Sunday Times called the memoir "a modern classic" and the TLS said it is "an exemplary memoir". The BBC has based their documentary The Man Who Went Looking for Freedom on her memoir. Bugan is the author of the critical study Séamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile, about which Modern Poetry in Translation said it is "a valuable resource that will be challenging to surpass" and her book of essays on politics and poetics, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, published by Oxford University Press, was named "an essential book for writers" by Poets and Writers. Bugan's bilingual edition of poetry and selected prose was published with Edizioni Kolibris in Italy, and is entitled On the Side of Forgetting/ Sulla Soglia Della Dimenticanza. Bugan was educated at the University of Michigan and Oxford University, UK, where she obtained a doctorate in English literature. Her essays, reviews, and poems appear in publications such as PEN, the TLS, Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, Harvard Review, and the BBC Magazine. She has taught at Oxford University (UK), University of Fribourg (Switzerland), and was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford University. In 2017 Bugan was made a George Orwell Prize Fellow. She has appeared at literary festivals and book fairs such at the London Book Fair in England, Goteborg Book Fair in Sweden, Cork Literary Festival in Ireland, Le Livre Sur Les Quais in Morges, Switzerland, and has read her work in Paris, Athens, Oxford, Bucharest, Boston, New York, London, and Chicago, among many other places. She currently teaches at the Gotham Writers Workshop in NYC and lives in Michigan. Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and taught at New York University in Abu Dhabi and Stony Brook University, NY.
