Trafika Europe is your online literary site for great new writing from across Europe in English translation, with our online quarterly digest. . . and Trafika Europe Radio – Europe’s first “literary” radio station – free online. We want to maintain a literate, creative space where writers, publishers, translators and readers can meet, share their work and interact, free of borders in the shared medium of English language.

Trafika Europe seeks to help renew the role of literature in nudging along the European conversation in culture, introduce new voices, foster collaborations and create a kind of “community of communities”. In cultivating an attractive space for it, we hope that a vision of greater cooperation, mutual regard and community across the 47 countries of Council of Europe will continue to grow of its own accord – via a shared appreciation of European literature in all its many forms and communities.

Our History

Trafika Europe follows a previous project, Trafika – a print quarterly of new fiction and poetry from around the world in fresh English translation. That earlier organization, Trafika, placed special emphasis on introducing the work of writers who were unknown or little-known to an English-language readership.

In seven issues, Trafika published the work of over 120 authors writing in over 30 languages. Contributors included: Czeslaw Milosz, Tomaz Salamun, Natasza Goerke, Don DeLillo, Mohammed Choukri, Ales Debeljak, Anna Swir, Gyorgy Konrad, Peter Nadas, Denis Johnson, Uche Nduka, Eleni Sikelianos, Yusef Komunyakaa, Martin M. Simecka, Hanoch Levin, Tor Ulven, Ilona Lackova, and Javiar Marias.

Our Board of Advisors (in their then-positions) included Morgan Entrekin (Grove/Atlantic); Tracy Cabanis (Alfred A. Knopf); George Dillehay (Publication Management); Jonathan Fanton (The MacArthur Foundation); Daniel Halpern (Ecco Press); Stephen Heintz (EastWest Institute); Peter Kaufman (TV Books); Jeri Laber (Human Rights Watch); Lewis Lapham (Harper’s Magazine); Maristella Lorch (The Italian Academy, New York); Wendy Luers (Foundation for a Civil Society); Marley Rusoff (Bantam, Doubleday & Dell); William Schwalbe (William Morrow & Co.); Elisabeth Sifton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Rebecca Sinkler (the New York Times), and Lise Stone.

We enjoyed grants/donations from The Nation Institute, The Calouste-Gulbenkian Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Council for Literary Magazines and Presses, Central and East European Book Publishing Project, Open Society Fund-Prague, and the Czech Ministry of Culture.

Our advertisers included Farrar Straus & Giroux, Harcourt Brace, Grand Street, The Nation, and Twisted Spoon Press. We also cross-advertised in other literary magazines, and achieved a special consultative status with The Paris Review.

Press

The previous print quarterly Trafika received glowing reviews in over 30 major newspapers, magazines and related periodicals. Praise for Trafika includes the following:

If magazines still exist 20 years from now… the literary ones are likely to resemble an attractive new quarterly… called Trafika.
The Washington Post

representative of the directions life will take as the world continues to come together: an inclusive one… comparisons neglect the originality… the literature of tomorrow today.
The LA Reader

a lit hit with international readers… sophisticated
TIME-International

features some heavy hitters… but more committed to publishing emerging writers… translated into English for the first time.
The International Herald-Tribune

reverse[s] the general flow of contemporary culture… Trafika proceeds with a humility rare in the New World Order.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian

dedicated to preserving a viable model of the world as a collection of affiliated cultures… a literary journal for the world

Good stuff!
The Guardian

new voices sing out
Times Literary Supplement

the writing comes from unexpected sources
The New Yorker

elegantly presented… ambitious
Poetry Review

screaming orgasm!
El Pais

elegant… spreads the net more widely
The Independent

a model for magazines of the future, bringing together writers… to see what we have in common as well as to celebrate our differences
Laughing Bear Newsletter

a globe-hopping assortment
Moscow Tribune

a success story
Jewish Daily Forward

worthy of the heritage of their Parisian forebears
Checkpoint/Berlin

international and professional… deft editing… well worth the cover price
Prognosis

Trafika promises more and delivers… wonderfully made
Cups

an exciting discovery… a winner
Library Journal

Trafika[‘s] contributors receive their inspiration from exotic locations and use their art to make those addresses open to the world.
Bloomsbury Review

surprisingly fresh… enables us to become super-sensitized to the plurality of methods being pursued by artists the whole world over… Check it out!
The Net

pages from many nations
Small Magazine Review

Additional press

Other publications and sources which have featured Trafika include:

• NBC News with Tom Brokaw
• BBC Radio
• CBS Radio
• The New York Times Magazine
• Svenska Dagbladet (Stockholm)
• The Independent Monitor (London)
• Passport – Sabena Airlines Magazine
• L’Espresso (Rome)
• Expresso (Lisbon)
• Der Tages Spiegel (Berlin)
• Mosty (Bratislava)
• Delo (Ljubljana)
• Emzin (Ljubljana)
• Dagbladet Fredag (Oslo)
• Lidove Noviny (Prague)
• Prague Post (Prague)
• Paper Magazine
• Magyar Narancs (Budapest)
• The Milwaukee Journal
• The Lancashire Evening Post

Trafika received the honor of a PEN Translation event in its name in New York in recognition of its overall achievement.

Now Trafika Europe has put a European frame around all this, to explore issues of identity and community in a larger shared Europe – by curating this shared space for European literature online.

Our Team

Trafika Europe:  many voices, one continent