Dr. Carmen Bugan, a George Orwell Prize Fellow, is a prize-winning writer based in Long Island, NY. She was born in Romania and has lived in England, Ireland, and France. Educated at the University of Michigan and Balliol College, Oxford University, UK, with a PhD in English Literature, she is the author of four collections of poems (the most recent a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation), an internationally acclaimed memoir, and a highly praised critical study. Her work has been translated into several languages and appears in publications such as PEN Atlas, Modern Poetry in Translation, the TLS, Harvard Review, PN Review, and others. Her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, has recently been published by Oxford University Press.She was a fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers (Scotland), a Creative Arts Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford University (UK), has received a major individual grant from the Arts Council England, and has taught creative writing and literature in the US, UK, and Switzerland.Bugan appears at bookfairs and festivals such as the London Book Fair, the Cork Literary Festival, the Goteborg Book Fair, and Le Livre sur les Quais (Morges, Switzerland) and lectures widely at universities in Europe and the United States. She is a member of the Geneva Writers Group and of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. In 2014 she presented a long-form documentary for the BBC World News and the World Service called 'The Man Who Went Looking for Freedom' on the story of her family, which is the subject of much of her writing.She teaches memoir, creative writing, and provides book doctoring and private tutorials at the Gotham Writers' Workshop in New York City. Carmen Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she lectured on Poetry and the Language of Oppression; she was also the 2018 Dow Visiting Scholar at Saginaw Valley State University, where she gave a keynote lecture on poetry in a time of politics. She chairs a monthly poetry reading series called Literary Excursions, at the Setauket Neighborhood House in East Setauket, NY, a platform she founded in 2016 to support local poets.
