Photo by Andrew Lederman

Albanian-born writer Ani Gjika is the award-winning author and literary translator of eight books and chapbooks of poetry, among them Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and 2011 May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize. Most recently, she is the recipient of the New Immigrant Writing Prize for her memoir, An Unruled Body (Restless Books, 2023), which was a 2023 Foreword INDIES winner and on the 2024 Massachusetts Book Awards longlist for Nonfiction.

Gjika moved to the U.S. when she was eighteen, earning a BA in English at Atlantic Union College, an MA in English at Simmons University, and an MFA in poetry at Boston University. Her translation from the Albanian of Negative Space by Luljeta Lleshanaku was published in 2018 by Bloodaxe Books in the U.K., where it was Poetry Book Society’s Recommended Translation and shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. It was published in the same year by New Directions in the U.S., where it was a finalist for a PEN Award and Best Translated Book Award.

Gjika is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the NEA, English PEN, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, the 2019 Pauline Scheer Fellowship through GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator program, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and residency fellowships from Banff Centre, Ledig House, and Millay Arts. Having taught creative writing at various universities in the U.S. and Thailand, Gjika currently teaches writing, social studies, and literature to English language learners at Framingham High School in Massachusetts.