Profile of Eliot Weinberger

Eliot Weinberger is an essayist, poet, edior and translator. His books of literary writings include Outside Stories, Karmic Traces, The Stars, and Muhammad.

Weinberger´s work regularly appears in translation and has been published in some thirty languages. His political articles are collected in What I Heard About Iraq, and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The Guardian said of What I Heard About Iraq: "Every war has its classic antiwar book, and here is Iraq’s". It has been adapted into a play, two cantatas, a dance performance, and various art installations; has appeared on some 100.000 websites; and was read or performed in nearly one hundred events throughout the world on 20 March 2006, the anniversary of the invasion.

The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, Weinberger is the translator of Unlock by the exiled poet Bei Dao, and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. Among his other translations are Octavio Paz' Collected Poems and Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions, which received the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism. In 1992, Weinberger was the first recipient of the PEN/Kolovakos Award for his promotion of Hispanic literature in the U.S.; in 2000, he became the only American literary writer to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico.

Weinberger is a curator of the Berlin International Literature Festival, an advisor to the Chinese diaspora magazine Jintian (Today) and to Artes de México, and he is prominently featured in the Visitor’s Key to Iceland. At the 2005 PEN World Voices Festival, he was presented as a "post-national writer". Weinberger lives in New York City.

• Weblinks
• Article, "What I Heard About Iraq", Literaturfestival Berlin
• Excerpt from 9/12, University of Chicago Press