Position Title
Assistant Professor of English
Biography
André Naffis-Sahely is a poet, translator and editor whose many publications include two collections of poetry, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin Books, 2017) and High Desert (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), and a chapbook, The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019), all of which have been acclaimed in the pages of The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, among others.
He edited The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (2020) an anthology of poetry, fiction and non-fiction that journeys that chronicles the experience of exile through six continents, with over a hundred contributors drawn from twenty-four languages.
He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, including works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Alessandro Spina, Abdellatif Laâbi, Frankétienne, Ribka Sibhatu and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Several were selected as ‘books of the year’ by NPR, The Guardian and Financial Times. His areas of specialty as a translator include Francophone and Italophone literature from the Caribbean and Maghreb, as well as poetry originally written in Venetian and Istrian.
His critical publications include the co-edited volumes, Mick Imlah: Selected Prose (Peter Lang, 2015), and The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB Editions, 2013). He served as the poetry editor of Ambit (2018-2020) and Poetry London (2021-2024), where he established a chapbook prize, as well as a lecture series in collaboration with the T.S. Eliot Foundation and Goldsmiths University.
He grew up in Abu Dhabi, but was born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother and was educated in Britain. He has taught at Whittier College, Occidental College, and UCLA, where he was the English Department’s Author in Residence in 2020.
Education, Awards and Professional Highlights
BA & PhD, University of Leicester; MLitt, University of St Andrews
Judge for Michael Marks Awards, UK (2021)
Judge for Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2020)
PEN Translates! Award, Aulò! Aulò! Aulò! by Ribka Sibhatu (2020)
Fondation Jan Michalski Residency, Switzerland (2019)
PEN Translates! Award for Chaophony by Frankétienne (2018)
Chair of Judges for PEN Center USA Translation Awards (2016)
PEN Translates! Award, Beyond the Barbed Wire by Abdellatif Laâbi (2016)
The MacDowell Colony Fellowship, NH, USA (2014)
Art OMI Ledig House Writers Residency, NY, USA (2014)
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellowship (2012)
G.S. Fraser Poetry Prize, English Department, University of Leicester (2010)
R.L. Borthwick Prize, Department of Politics, University of Leicester (2007)