Amaia is a writer, a flamenco singer and literary translator specialized in Basque literature. She currently teaches in the creative writing program at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and performs regularly in venues all over the city. 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 now lives.
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 performs new arrangements of pieces from the flamenco and classical traditions to create "radically modern versions of the classics." Recorded in Chicago, their album KANTUZ : 1931 was released in 2019.
Her latest literary translations include Twist by Harkaitz Cano for Archipelago Books in NY, A Glass Eye by Miren Agur Meabe for Parthian Books in the UK (both published in 2018), and two seminal collections by the father of modern Basque poetry, Gabriel Aresti, Rock & Core and Downhill, for the University of Nevada Press, published in 2017. This last work earned her the 2018 Kutxa-Laboral Literary Translation Prize, the highest award for the translation of Basque literature.
She's currently at work on Unai Elorriaga's new novel Old Maps and Old Bones, Katixa Agirre's Mother's Don't and Alaine Agirre's poetry collection Where Birds Never Visit.
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 five 2020 CLEAR Marine Lab Artists in Residence at St. John's Memorial University, where she'll be writing eco-fiction based on research around plastic pollution in the sea, and linking the songs and stories of her Basque seafaring ancestors with the native songs and sea stories of Newfoundland.
She is one of the 2020 Judges for the National Translation Award in Prose.
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 performs new arrangements of pieces from the flamenco and classical traditions to create "radically modern versions of the classics." Recorded in Chicago, their album KANTUZ : 1931 was released in 2019.
Her latest literary translations include Twist by Harkaitz Cano for Archipelago Books in NY, A Glass Eye by Miren Agur Meabe for Parthian Books in the UK (both published in 2018), and two seminal collections by the father of modern Basque poetry, Gabriel Aresti, Rock & Core and Downhill, for the University of Nevada Press, published in 2017. This last work earned her the 2018 Kutxa-Laboral Literary Translation Prize, the highest award for the translation of Basque literature.
She's currently at work on Unai Elorriaga's new novel Old Maps and Old Bones, Katixa Agirre's Mother's Don't and Alaine Agirre's poetry collection Where Birds Never Visit.
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 five 2020 CLEAR Marine Lab Artists in Residence at St. John's Memorial University, where she'll be writing eco-fiction based on research around plastic pollution in the sea, and linking the songs and stories of her Basque seafaring ancestors with the native songs and sea stories of Newfoundland.
She is one of the 2020 Judges for the National Translation Award in Prose.
Photo credit: John Boehm