Carmen Bugan was educated at the Univeristy of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in Ireland and at Balliol College, Oxford, where she researched a doctorate on East European poetry in translation and the work of Seamus Heaney. Her poetry and short essays appear, among other places, in PN Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and Harvard Review. She was an editor of Oxford Poetry and is a Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, where she is finishing her second collection of poems, The House of Straw, writing a memoir, and running a series of lectures on 'Poets as Translators'. For her poetry she was given a Hopwood Award and a Cowden Memorial Fellowship at Michigan and a generous grant from the Arts Council of England.