Biographical note

Carmen Bugan was born in Romania in 1970 and emigrated to the US with her family in 1989, following her father's imprisonment for protesting against the Ceausescu regime. She was educated at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Lancaster University, The Poets House (Ireland), and at Balliol College, Oxford, where she obtained a doctorate in English Literature. Hear an interview with her here on US Public Radio. In addition to her collections of poems Crossing the Carpathians: Poems (Oxford Poets/Carcanet), The House of Straw (Shearsman Books) and Releasing the Porcelain Birds (Shearsman Books), she has written a critical study on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile, and a memoir, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police, a memoir: the American edition of this book won the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction and the English edition was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Her work is also published in Harvard Review, PN Review, Penguin's Poems for Life, Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American, the Tabla Book of New Verse, the Forward Book of Poetry, Magma, the TLS, and Modern Poetry in Translation. A recipient of a large grant from the Arts Council of England, Bugan was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. She now lives in the USA with her husband and children.