Kirmen Uribe


Kirmen Uribe is a Basque language writer. He won the National Prize for Literature in Spain in 2009 for his first novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao. The languages into which the novel has been translated exceed fifteen, including French and Japanese. His poetry collection Meanwhile Take My Hand, translated into English by Elizabeth Macklin, was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His works have been published on The New Yorker, Open City and Little Star.

Early life

Kirmen Uribe was born in Ondarroa, a fishing town about one hour from Bilbao. Uribe's father was a trawlerman and his mother was a homemaker. He studied Basque Philology at the University of the Basque Country–Gasteiz, and did his graduate studies in Comparative Literature in Trento, Italy. He won his first literary prize in 1995 while he was in jail for being conscientious objector and refusing to go to compulsory military service.

Career

''Bilbao-New York-Bilbao''

In 2008 Uribe published his first novel, Bilbao–New York–Bilbao. The book sparked great curiosity. It received the Critics' Prize and the Spanish Literature Prize for Narrative. In early 2010 it was brought out simultaneously in Spanish, Galician and Catalan. The novel Bilbao–New York–Bilbao is set on a hypothetical flight that its narrator, one Kirmen Uribe, takes from Bilbao's Loiu Airport to New York's J.F.K. On the flight the writer contemplates his supposed novel-in-progress, which is about three generations of a family, his own, whose life is bound up with the sea. Bilbao–New York–Bilbao is a novel with no conventional plot to speak of. Its structure is that of a net, and the knots of the net are the stories of the three generations as they intersect with crosswise stories and reflections on the twentieth century as it was experienced in the Basque Country. Ollie Brock wrote about the novel in The Times Literary Supplement in August 2011: "Uribe has succeeded in realizing what is surely an ambition for many writers: a book that combines family, romances and literature, anchored deeply in a spoken culture but also in bookishness —and all without a single note of self-congratulation".

''Mussche''

His second novel, Mussche, translated into Spanish as Lo que mueve el mundo is a docu-fictional novel that tells the story of one the thousands of Basque children who left the port of Bilbao way to exile in May 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, after the bombing of Guernica. Carmen, a girl of eight years, was hosted in the home of a poet and translator in Ghent, Belgium. The writer’s life changes with the arrival of the child and, gradually, the events lead to an unexpected ending. “A thrilling novel from the first line to the last. The vicissitudes of the young Belgian writer related to Basque war children, is a narrative tense, exemplary in its structure and that oozes authenticity” reviewed César Coca. The novel shows the cruelty and absurdity of war to some extent, and it is recognized as a great work on the subject of anti-war. The Japanese translation, by Kaneko Nami, was awarded as the best translation of 2015 in Japan.

''The Hour of Waking Together''

His last novel, Elkarrekin esnatzeko ordua, continues in the recovery of forgotten lives to make fiction. Tells the life of Karmele Urresti, a Basque nurse who exiles to Paris in 1937, where she becomes involved with the Basque Cultural Embassy. It is there she meets her future husband, the musician Txomin Letamendi. Together they travel Europe, but when they know that Paris has fallen to the Germans, they flee to Venezuela. In Venezuela History gets again in their lives. Txomin decides to join the Basque secret services and so the family goes back to Europe, just in the middle of World War II. He spies the Nazis until he gets arrested in Barcelona, under a dictatorship he won’t survive. Karmele will have to risk everything and part, again and alone, to Venezuela.
JA Masoliver Ródenas wrote in La Vanguardia about the novel: «The direct and precise prose of Kirmen Uribe doesn’t have to fool us: it’s fruit of accuracy, not simplicity. His background is that of a cosmopolitan and sophisticated writer. A writer of great and real talent.» The novel was simultaneously published in Basque, Spanish and Catalan and won 2016 Spanish Critic’s Award and 2016 Basque Readers Academy Award.

On the international scene

He has participated in a number of international literary festivals including: New York’s PEN World Voices Festival, the Berlin International Poetry Festival, Tai Pei International Poetry Festival and Medellin International Poetry Festival. He has given lectures and led seminars at Stanford, Brown, New York University, University of Chicago, Ohio State, California Institute of the Arts, University of California-San Diego and the University of Foreign Studies of Tokyo, among others.
His poems have appeared in renowned periodicals and international anthologies. In May 2003 The New Yorker magazine published his poem "May." Since then his work has appeared in other U.S. journals as well. In 2006, the Berlin online magazine Lyrikline published a selection of ten of his poems in German translation; it was the first time that journal of international poetry had ever published work by a Basque writer. In 2008, the American literary critics Kevin Prufer and Wayne Millar included three of Uribe's poems in their New European Poets anthology.
In 2017 he was selected for the International Writers Program in Iowa City.

Works

Poetry