Amaia is a writer, a flamenco singer and literary translator specialized in Basque literature. She is the most prolific translator of Basque literature to date, as well as a pioneer in the field, and has received multiple awards for her work; among them, a Wingate Scholarship, the OMI Writers Translation Lab award, a Mellon Fellowship for Arts and Scholarship, and an artist-in-residence award at the Cervantes Institute in Chicago. She has published and performed on both sides of the Atlantic: in Ireland and Great Britain, the countries in which she carried out her university education, and in the US, where she lived until 2020. She now splits her time between the US and the Basque Country, where she spends a lot of time freediving and recording the sounds of the Kantauri sea.
In 2019, she collaborated with Jenny Holzer in her Bilbao Guggenheim retrospective, translating her Truisms and Inflammatory Essays into Basque, and helping in the selection of Basque poems to project onto the museum's facade.
With Kantuz, her classical-flamenco-jazz quartet, she created new arrangements of pieces from the flamenco and classical traditions that are "radically modern versions of the classics." Recorded in Chicago, their album KANTUZ : 1931 was released in 2019 to great reviews.
Her two seminal collections by the father of modern Basque poetry, Gabriel Aresti, Rock & Core and Downhill, published by the University of Nevada Press in 2017 earned her the 2018 Kutxa-Laboral Literary Translation Prize, the highest award for the translation of Basque literature.
Forthcoming literary translations in 2021 and 2022 include Old Dogs, Old Bones by Unai Elorriaga for Archipelago Books in NY, Burning Bones by Miren Agur Meabe for Parthian Books in the UK, and Kantauri: An Anthology of Basque Female Poets, which she is editing and translating for Parthian too.
She is writing ‘a novel in flamenco song,’ a work structured around a chain of flamenco songs, a hybrid experiment that is both literary and performative.
She is one of the nine Pererindod/Pilgrimage artists involved in a new project by Invertigo and Cwmni Tebot in Wales, to support artists to create bold, new work, while forging links with other artists throughout Wales and the Basque Country.
Photo credit: John Boehm
In 2019, she collaborated with Jenny Holzer in her Bilbao Guggenheim retrospective, translating her Truisms and Inflammatory Essays into Basque, and helping in the selection of Basque poems to project onto the museum's facade.
With Kantuz, her classical-flamenco-jazz quartet, she created new arrangements of pieces from the flamenco and classical traditions that are "radically modern versions of the classics." Recorded in Chicago, their album KANTUZ : 1931 was released in 2019 to great reviews.
Her two seminal collections by the father of modern Basque poetry, Gabriel Aresti, Rock & Core and Downhill, published by the University of Nevada Press in 2017 earned her the 2018 Kutxa-Laboral Literary Translation Prize, the highest award for the translation of Basque literature.
Forthcoming literary translations in 2021 and 2022 include Old Dogs, Old Bones by Unai Elorriaga for Archipelago Books in NY, Burning Bones by Miren Agur Meabe for Parthian Books in the UK, and Kantauri: An Anthology of Basque Female Poets, which she is editing and translating for Parthian too.
She is writing ‘a novel in flamenco song,’ a work structured around a chain of flamenco songs, a hybrid experiment that is both literary and performative.
She is one of the nine Pererindod/Pilgrimage artists involved in a new project by Invertigo and Cwmni Tebot in Wales, to support artists to create bold, new work, while forging links with other artists throughout Wales and the Basque Country.
Photo credit: John Boehm