Leire Bilbao - Between Fish Scales
Leire Bilbao
Between Fish Scales
Translated from Basque by
JOANA URTASUN
Afterword by
LEIRE ERVITI
Bilingual Edition
April 7, 2026
ISBN 978-1-954218-47-5
Distributed by
Asterism Books (US)
Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
LEIRE BILBAO was born in the coastal town of Ondarroa in 1978, into a fishing family. She is the author of several poetry collections in Basque, some of which have been translated into Spanish, by herself and others. She’s an award-winning singer of improvised verse (bertsolari), and her most recent poetry collection, Home Waters, won the Lauaxeta Prize—a prestigious annual award for a poetry collection in Basque given by the Council of Biscay. Her work has been published in Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Greek. Bilbao received Spain’s National Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, granted by the Spanish Culture Ministry, as well as the Premio Euskadi—a regional recognition for children's literature—on two occasions. She is also a playwright and lyricist. She lives and works in Durango, outside of Bilbao. Between Fish Scales is her English-language debut.
JOANA URTASUN is a writer and translator who grew up between the Basque Country and the UK and is based in New York. She received her MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The London Magazine, METAL Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Anthropocene Poetry Journal, among others, and she was a finalist in The Sewanee Review’s sixth poetry contest. Leire Bilbao’s, Between Fish Scales: Selected Poems (World Poetry, 2026) is her first book of translation.
PRESS
Leire Bilbao
Between Fish Scales
Translated from Basque by
JOANA URTASUN
Afterword by
LEIRE ERVITI
In her English-language debut, Basque poet Leire Bilbao gives us a visceral view of motherhood, worklife, and plural desire in a maritime landscape, both hyper-real and eerily anthropomorphic.
Carrying the melodies of her early, bardic work as a bertsolari (singer of improvised Basque verse), and a lived knowledge of local fishing traditions, Bilbao weaves a net of unfamiliar language that trawls the depths of femininity. She can turn a mother into a mollusk, an eye into a buoy, and a newborn into a thief in the span of a moment. This selection from several of Bilbao’s books makes her work available for the first time to English-language readers, and marks Basque-UK poet Joana Urtasun’s first book as a translator.
“If Sharon Olds dreamed in Basque, her dreams might sound like Leire Bilbao.” —Kirmen Uribe
“Leire Bilbao’s poems, in Joana Urtasun’s English, are cadenced flows from a fluid economy of birth, motherhood, water and blood, of food from the oven and smells of sea. They net us deep in a rural coastal culture of Euskal Herria, in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, a culture and upbringing close to fish and rocks and water. Urtasun gives us a work limpid and vivid (echoes strongly, for me, Lupe Gómez’s land-based Galician culture, just to the west), attuned to her own ear, that touches our shared human experience of becoming, community, endurance.” —Erín Moure
“I loved reading Basque poet Leire Bilbao’s playful, shapeshifting verse. This is a book of small, strange miracles, in which decidedly feminine acts of transformation refresh the understanding with odd figures and bold simplicity: ‘A mother is a place / of crossing. / A door for another.’ Joana Urtasun’s keen introduction and translations honor the elemental, gnomic poems of Between Fish Scales with a dynamic understanding far superior to mere accuracy.” —Katie Peterson
BIOS
LEIRE BILBAO was born in the coastal town of Ondarroa in 1978, into a fishing family. She is the author of several poetry collections in Basque, some of which have been translated into Spanish, by herself and others. She’s an award-winning singer of improvised verse (bertsolari), and her most recent poetry collection, Home Waters, won the Lauaxeta Prize—a prestigious annual award for a poetry collection in Basque given by the Council of Biscay. Her work has been published in Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Greek. Bilbao received Spain’s National Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, granted by the Spanish Culture Ministry, as well as the Premio Euskadi—a regional recognition for children's literature—on two occasions. She is also a playwright and lyricist. She lives and works in Durango, outside of Bilbao. Between Fish Scales is her English-language debut.
JOANA URTASUN is a writer and translator who grew up between the Basque Country and the UK and is based in New York. She received her MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The London Magazine, METAL Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Anthropocene Poetry Journal, among others, and she was a finalist in The Sewanee Review’s sixth poetry contest. Leire Bilbao’s, Between Fish Scales: Selected Poems (World Poetry, 2026) is her first book of translation.
PRESS
Bilingual Edition
April 7, 2026
ISBN 978-1-954218-47-5
Distributed by
Asterism Books (US)
Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
