Olivia Elias

Poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias writes in French. As a child she lived in Lebanon where her family had taken refuge in 1948. At the age of sixteen, she moved to Montréal, Canada, and later settled in France. Her third poetry collection, Chaos, Traversée appeared in 2019. Characterized by terse, laconic language and strong rhythms, her poetry shows a deep sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, the plight of refugees and human suffering in general. Her work has been translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Slovenian and Japanese, and has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Chaos, Crossing, an extended bilingual version of the French book translated by Kareem James Abu Zeid, marks her debut collection in English. Published by World Poetry in 2022, it was a finalist  of the 2024 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation. She is also the author of the chapbook Your Name, Palestine, a long poem translated by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Robert (World Poetry, 2023).

Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is an Egyptian-American translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world who translates from Arabic, French, and German. He has received the Sarah Maguire Prize for poetry in translation, an NEA translation grant, PEN Center USA’s translation prize, Poetry Magazine’s translation prize, a Fulbright research fellowship, and residencies from the Lannan Foundation and the Banff International Center for the Arts, among other honors. His book-length translations include work by Najwan Darwish (Palestine), Adonis (Syria), Dunya Mikhail (Iraq), and Rabee Jaber (Lebanon). He is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice. Visit his site.