Yasmine Seale

Yasmine Seale, a writer, translator, printmaker, and artist, was born in London in 1989. 

Among Seale’s translations from Arabic are Something Evergreen Called Life (Action Books, 2022), a collection of poems by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun, and The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton, 2021), described by The New Yorker as “an electric new translation.” Seale is the coauthor of Agitated Air (Tenement Press, 2022), a collaboration with the translator Robin Moger, responding to the work of the poet and metaphysician Ibn Arabi.

Seale’s reviews and essays on literature, art, myth, archaeology, and film have appeared in Harper’s magazine, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Poetry Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Apollo magazine, Frieze magazine, and elsewhere.

Seale’s honors include the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from PEN America, The Wolfson Foundation, Koç University in Istanbul, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.

Seale serves on the advisory board of City of Asylum, a nonprofit organization that supports writers in exile, and her visual works are in the permanent collection of The British Museum. She has given talks and lectures at numerous universities, including Yale, Harvard, Oxford, and SOAS University of London. She has performed her work internationally at various institutions, such as Maison de la Poésie in Paris to the Lahore Literary Festival. She is currently a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Seale also teaches in the writing program at Columbia University.