Releasing the Porcelain Birds

About Carmen Bugan

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 two previous collections of poems Crossing the Carpathians: Poems (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet: 2004) and The House of Straw (Shearsman 2013) she has written a critical study on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile and Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police a memoir: the American edition of this book has 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. Bugan has been a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College Oxford and a Fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. She She now lives near New York with her husband and children.