Diana Manole is a Romanian-Canadian scholar and literary translator, and the author of nine books of poetry and drama in her home country. She has translated or co-translated seven poetry collections, including Nora Iuga’s The Hunchbacks’ Bus (Bitter Oleander Press, 2016), which was longlisted for the American Literary Translators Association’s 2017 National Translation Award in Poetry.

Adam Sorkin is a translator of contemporary Romanian literature, and holds the title of Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Penn State Brandywine. His most recent publications are Syllables of Flesh by Floarea Țuțuianu, translated with Irma Giannetti (Plamen Press, 2017) and The Barbarians’ Return by Mircea Dinescu, translated with Lidia Vianu (Bloodaxe Books, 2018). He co-translated Nora Iuga’s The Hunchbacks’ Bus (Bitter Oleander Press, 2016) with Diana Manole.

Nora Iuga is one of Romania’s most important and original poets. Her first collection of poems, It Isn’t My Fault, was published in 1968. Her second book, The Circle’s Captivity (1970), was accused by Communist censors of disseminating ‘morbid eroticism,’ and as a result Iuga was banned from publishing. Between 1971 and 1978, her books were withdrawn from public libraries and bookstores in Romania. To date, she has published seven books of prose and 19 collections of poems, including the award-winning Opinions on Pain (1980) and, most recently, Next to the Road (2019). Iuga is also an acclaimed translator of over thirty books by German-language authors.