Gazmend Kapllani Author, Emerson College
He lived in Athens for over twenty years. He received his PhD in political science and history from Panteion University in Athens, with a dissertation on the image of Albanians in the Greek press and of Greeks in the Albanian press.
In addition, he was a columnist for Greece’s leading daily newspapers. Kapllani has written his first three novels in Greek, which is not his native language. His work centers on themes of migration, borders, totalitarianism, and how Balkan history has shaped public and private narratives. Kapllani’s first novel A Short Border Handbook (Livanis, 2006) has become a best-seller and has been translated into Danish, English, French, Polish, Albanian and Italian. It will be published in the US by New Europe Books in fall 2107. The novel was adapted, with his collaboration, for the stage by the Bornholms Theater in Denmark and the National Theater of the Deaf in Greece, and the play has been performed in Denmark, Greece, Bolivia and France.
His second novel, My Name is Europe (Livanis, 2010), has been published into French. The Last Page (Livanis, 2013) his most recent novel, has been translated into French and was short-listed for The Cezam Prix Litteraire Inter CE 2016. Especially well known by French- , Greek-, Albanian- Italian- and English-speaking readers, his books have been included as required reading at universities such as the University of Vienna, Columbia and Princeton.
Since 2012 he has been living in the US and has been the recipient of prestigious fellowships and residencies. In 2012, he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; in 2013 an International Writers Project Fellow at the Literary Arts Program at Brown University and in 2015 writer-in-residence at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College. Kapllani currently lives in Boston and teaches Creative Writing and European History at Emerson College.
