A Different Distance : A Renga

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons and A Stranger's Mirror (longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award), a collaborative book, Diaspo/ Renga, written with Deema K. Shehabi, and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices. Her eighteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Samira Negrouche's The Olive Trees' Jazz, Jean-Paul de Dadelsen's That Light, All at Once, and Claire Malroux's Daybreak. She is a former editor of the Kenyon Review, and of the French literary journal Siècle 21. She received the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen, the
2010 PEN Voelcker Award for her own work, and the international Argana
Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh'ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in
2011. She lives in Paris.

Karthika Naïr is the coauthor of A Different Distance. She is a poet, fabulist and librettist whose books include The Honey Hunter, illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her
reimagining of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices,
won the 2015 Tate Literature Live Award for Book of the Year (Fiction),
was shortlisted for the Atta Galatta Prize and highly commended in the
2016 Forward Prizes. Naïr has scripted and coscripted performances for
choreographers Akram Khan (DESH, Chotto Desh, and Until the Lions, adapted from her own book), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Damien Jalet (Babel 7.16), and Carlos Pons Guerra (Mariposa).
She is the co-founder of Cherkaoui's Antwerp-based dance company,
Eastman, and executive producer of several of his and Damien Jalet's
works.