Kirmen Uribe (pronounced ; born October 5, 1970) is a Basque-born New York-based award-winning writer whose work transcends borders, weaving together personal and collective histories. Through poetry and fiction, he explores themes of identity, migration, and memory, and reinvents the form.Elizalde, Amaia; Olaziregi, Mari Jose https://basquebooks.com/products/kirmen-uribe-life-and-fiction His debut novel, Bilbao–New York–Bilbao (Coffee House Press, 2022), won National Prize for Literature in Spain. His works have been translated into over twenty languages. Uribe's poetry has appeared in journals including The New Yorker and The Paris Review. In 2018, he received the New York Public Library Cullman Center Writing Fellowship. He now lives in New York City with his family, where he teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA program in Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University (NYU).
Early life Kirmen Uribe was born in Ondarroa, a fishing town about one hour from Bilbao. Uribe's father (who died in 1999) was a trawlerman and his mother was a homemaker. He studied Basque Philology at the University of the Basque Country–Gasteiz, and completed graduate studies in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory in Trento, Italy. He won his first literary prize in 1995 while in jail for being a conscientious objector and refusing compulsory military service.
1. College Years
Early Poetry and Multimedia Beginnings Uribe’s first literary expressions were avant-garde poems — influenced by Fernando Pessoa, Dylan Thomas, and Georg Trakl — that his brother set to music during their high school years,The name of his brother's band was TU-K: https://open.spotify.com/intl-es/artist/4MQnRyL68wuL62m2UPO4Bg as well as poems published in small university plaquettes. During college, he became deeply involved in the cultural and literary life of Vitoria-Gasteiz, where he was active in several social movements.Kirmen Uribe about his peace activism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1WGsoVsJJM Around that time, he met singer-songwriter Mikel Urdangarin, with whom he created several multimedia projectsBob Holman and Margary Snyder selected the CD-Book Zaharregia, txikiegia agian as one of the best audio-books: https://hotsak.eus/en/albisteak/zaharregia-txikiegia-agian-one-of-the-best-poetry-cds-of-the-year/Zaharregia, txikiegia agian: https://open.spotify.com/intl-es/album/2H1mDlnDvyWp0tMWDcgnsKJainko txiki eta jostalari hura: https://open.spotify.com/intl-es/album/2Z955cIMV9ZHg4WxMfYb5q that combined poetry, music, and visual art, including Bar Puerto.
Bar Puerto
In 2000, when his grandmother’s house was demolished to make way for a new road, Uribe filmed the neighborhood’s residents, weaving together oral history, traditional harbor songs, and poetry, with the collaboration of filmmaker Josu Eizagirre Olea. The result was Bar Puerto,Bar Puerto, book and DVD: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Puerto-Liburua-Kirmen-Uribe-Urbieta/dp/8497839498 an on-stage documentary and reading that blended archival material, oral memory, and performance.This fusion of archival work, popular culture, and poetry would come to define Uribe’s body of work.Otaegi, L. in Elizalde, Amaia; Olaziregi, Mari Jose https://basquebooks.com/products/kirmen-uribe-life-and-fiction
Meanwhile Take My Hand The creative intensity of those years in Vitoria culminated in his poetry collection Meanwhile Take My Hand (Graywolf, 2007), described by critic Jon Kortazar as a “calm poetic revolution.”Kortazar, Jon (2008) https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/bhs.85.1.8 Uribe has written that the book emerged after his father death, during a period of mourning: “And suddenly the book took on my father’s role; it showed me the path — it taught me the work of writing.” The collection, translated by Elizabeth Macklin, was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
2. Trilogy of Passage
In 2005, Uribe returned to his hometown of Ondarroa, where he wrote three novels — Bilbao–New York–Bilbao, Mussche, and The Hour of Waking up Together. These works gave voice to silenced stories through unconventional narrative forms, moving from autofiction to documentary-style novels featuring real characters. Together, they have been referred to as Trilogy of Passage, as they explore the experiences of characters in displacement.
Bilbao-New York-Bilbao In 2008 Uribe published his first novel, Bilbao–New York–Bilbao (Coffee House Press, 2022 edition, trans. Elizabeth Macklin). The novel won the National Prize for Literature in Spain. It is set on a hypothetical flight from Bilbao Airport to New York's J.F.K. during which the narrator, one Kirmen Uribe, reflects on a novel-in-progress about three generations of his seafaring family.
The novel has no conventional plot. Its structure is that of a net, its “knots” formed by stories of the three generations, intersecting with digressions and reflections on the twentieth century as experienced in the Basque Country. It incorporates poems, letters, emails, and prose fragments into a hybrid narrative. The foreword by Youmna Chlala highlights its “suspended narratives, above and below the sea,” emphasizing the hybrid form as spatial and temporal — a work that regenerates itself rather than proceeds linearly.
Ollie Brock wrote about the novel in The Times Literary Supplement in August 2011: "Uribe has succeeded in realizing what is surely an ambition for many writers: a book that combines family, romances and literature, anchored deeply in a spoken culture but also in bookishness —and all without a single note of self-congratulation".Kortazar, Jon (2013) https://www.iberoamericana-vervuert.es/FichaLibro.aspx?P1=62408
The novel was selected by El País as one of the 100 best Spanish books of the XXIth Century.
Mussche In his second novel, Mussche (2013), Uribe recounts to a recently deceased close friendHis friend was the filmmaker Aitzol Aramaio: https://www.imdb.com/es-es/name/nm1568630/ the story of Belgian poet and translator Robert Mussche, who in 1937 took in a Basque girl displaced by the Spanish Civil War at his home in Ghent. The girl’s arrival profoundly changed his life. The novel employs a form of narratorial impersonation,https://oxfordre.com/literature/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1127?d=%2F10.1093%2Facrefore%2F9780190201098.001.0001%2Facrefore-9780190201098-e-1127&p=emailAi.ayuDy1STUE as Uribe adopts Mussche’s voice to articulate his own reflections and emotions. Through this technique, he refracts personal experience indirectly, exploring memory and loss through the life of another.Olaziregi, Marijose in https://basquebooks.com/products/kirmen-uribe-life-and-fiction
"A thrilling novel from the first line to the last. The vicissitudes of the young Belgian writer related to Basque war children is a narrative tense, exemplary in its structure and that oozes authenticity" reviewed César Coca (El Correo).On the occasion of the Dutch publication of the book, Uribe collaborated with the Belgian pianist Wim Mertens in a recital that combined readings from the novel with live music – https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20131129/wim-mertens-este-recital-hay-dos-voces-kirmen-uribe-mia/806720.shtml
Mussche has been recognized as a significant anti-war novel.
The Hour of Waking up Together
His third novel, The Hour of Waking Up Together (2016), continues his exploration of forgotten lives to make fiction. This documentary novel follows the life of Karmele Urresti, a Basque nurse exiled to Paris in 1937, where she joins the Basque Cultural Embassy and meets the jazz trumpeter Txomin Letamendi. After the German occupation, they flee to Venezuela. There, both join the Office of Strategic Services OSS to fight fascism and investigate Nazi networks, a mission that sends them back to Europe during World War II. Letamendi’s later killing in Spain remained uninvestigated, obscured by Francoist structures of impunity, and the novel seeks to illuminate this unresolved act of political violence.
JA Masoliver Ródenas wrote in La Vanguardia: «The direct and precise prose of Kirmen Uribe doesn't have to fool us: it's the fruit of accuracy, not simplicity. His background is that of a cosmopolitan and sophisticated writer. (…) A writer of great and real talent.https://addi.ehu.es/bitstream/handle/10810/65472/COPIA%20PREPRINT%20OLAZIREGI%20FINAL.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y»
With this novel, Uribe closed his trilogy, a narrative cycle that gives Basque history a universal dimension.
The Alphabet of the Bilbao Museum In 2018, before relocating to New York, Uribe collaborated with the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum on The Alphabet of the Bilbao Museum (ABC. Bilboko Museoaren alfabetoa), an exhibition celebrating the institution’s 110th anniversary. Presented in an alphabetical rather than chronological or art-historical order, the show featured Uribe’s literary curatorship and was organized around 27 letters of the Latin alphabet, plus three Basque digraphs — “ts,” “tx,” and “tz” — each tied to a guiding concept. By juxtaposing artworks from different eras and styles, both ancient and contemporary, he crafted a new narrative of art history that highlighted the diversity and depth of the museum’s collection.
3. American Years In the same year, after participating in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Uribe settled in New York City. He was awarded the Cullman Center Fellowship at the New York Public Library, where he began writing his novel Life Before Dolphins.
Uribe’s time in New York marks a decisive expansion of his creative universe. His writing becomes more philosophical and experimental, and his perspective more universal, while maintaining the ethical and affective foundations of his work. From this period onward, his literature assumes a transnational dimension, moving between languages, territories, and literary traditions.
Saturraran During these years, he frequently traveled between Europe and the United States and wrote the opera libretto Saturraran (music by Juan Carlos Pérez), premiered in June 2024 at the Teatro Arriaga in Bilbao. Inspired by W. H. Auden’s Elegy for Young Lovers and a local legend, it tells the story of two women whose love is condemned by society. Set in the 1980s, against the backdrop of heroin addiction, AIDS, and the decline of the fishing industry, Saturraran has been described as "a lyrical tribute to a lost generation and its struggle for freedom".
Life Before Dolphins Life Before Dolphins (Coffee House Press, forthcoming 2027; trans. Megan McDowell) is a lyrical fusion of memoir, historical narrative, and philosophical reflection that explores transformation, exile, and love. The novel is anchored in the forgotten legacy of Rosika Schwimmer—a pioneering suffragist, pacifist, and diplomat denied U.S. citizenship for refusing to bear arms. Interwoven with her story is the narrator’s own journey from the Basque Country to New York City, mirroring Schwimmer’s struggle for conscience and belonging.
Told through multiple perspectives and experimental forms — an unfinished novel, a pandemic era letter, and a TikTok video — Life Before Dolphins continues Uribe’s exploration of the novel as a “living system” or “self-regenerating narrative.” It merges the formal experimentation of Modernism (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald) with the interconnected vision of 21st-century systems thinking, including ecology, networks, neuroscience, and interdependence.
Recent Recognition In 2025, one of Uribe’s poems was included in The New Yorker’s centennial poetry anthology, marking a milestone in his international recognition. That same year, Basque filmmaker Asier Altuna Iza premiered the feature film Karmele at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, based on The Hour of Waking Together.
Works
Novels