Poets

Kirmen Uribe (pronounced [ˈkiɾmen uˈɾibe]; born October 5, 1970) is a Basque-language writer, and one of the most relevant writers of his generation in Spain. He won the National Prize for Literature in Spain in 2009 for his first novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, a work that was acclaimed as a literary event. The languages into which the novel has been translated already exceed fourteen, including French (Gallimard) and Japanese (Hakusui Sha). His poetry collection Meanwhile Take My Hand (Graywolf, 2007), translated into English by Elizabeth Macklin, was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The first draft of his last novel Mussche (translated into Spanish as Lo que mueve el mundo, 2012) was completed during a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito (CA). His works have been published on several American publications such as The New Yorker, Open City or Little Star.
Kirmen Uribe was born in Ondarroa (Basque Country), a small fishing town about one hour from Bilbao. Uribe's father (who died in 1999) was a trawlerman and his mother was a homemaker. He studied Basque Philology at the University of the Basque Country–Gasteiz, and did his graduate studies in Comparative Literature in Trento, Italy. In October 2009 he was awarded the Spanish Literature Prize, for his novel Bilbao–New York–Bilbao. For the same work he had received the 2008 Critics' Prize for a novel written in Basque.