André Naffis-Sahely is a poet, editor and translator whose many publications include two collections, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin Books, 2017) and High Desert (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), and a pamphlet, The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). He edited The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (2020) and was Editor of Poetry London for three years, stepping down after the Spring 2024 issue. He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, including works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Alessandro Spina, Abdellatif Laâbi, Frankétienne, Ribka Sibhatu and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Several of these titles were selected as 'books of the year' by NPR, The Guardian and Financial Times.
He grew up in Abu Dhabi, but was born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother. He has taught at Whittier College, Occidental College, and University of California, Los Angeles, where he was the Author in Residence. He is a Lecturer at the University of California, Davis in the US and a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Manchester Writing School in the UK, and was editor of Poetry London from 2022 to 2024.
Author photo: Nina Subin
