PARTICIPANTS
NEW YORK
Max Besora was born in Barcelona in 1980. He has a a PhD in Literature from the University of Barcelona. He started by giving poetry recitals and then publishing poetry, before switching to novels.
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Mary Ann Newman Mary Ann Newman translates from Catalan and, occasionally, Spanish. She has done fiction by Quim Monzó and Josep Maria de Sagarra, essay by Xavier Rubert de Ventós, poetry by Josep Carner, Maria Callís, Àngels Gregori, and now a snippet from Eugeni d’Ors. Newman has received the Creu de Sant Jordi (1998), the J-B. Cendrós Award (2016), the NACS Award for Catalan Studies (2017), and the Fundació Ramon Llull Award (2022) for her work as a translator and advocate for Catalan culture. For fun, she curates Sant Jordi festivals.
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Sarah Ruden is a leading translator of ancient texts, including Virgil’s Aeneid and Augustine’s Confessions; her book The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Biblewas published by Knopf/Pantheon in 2017. Her prose has appeared in The American Scholar, The Wall Street Journal and Books & Culture. She is the author of the poetry collection Other Places and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award. She lives in Connecticut.
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Jennifer Shyue is an accomplished translator focusing on contemporary Cuban and Asian-Peruvian writers, translating both poetry and prose. Her work has been published in Poetry Magazine, McSweeney’s, and Guernica, among other literary journals. She helps edit at New Vessel Press and Ugly Duckling Presse’s Señal Latin American poetry series.
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Irene Vallejo is the author of the internationally bestselling Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, which has been translated into over 30 languages. Papyrus was awarded the National Essay Prize and the Critical Eye Prize for Narrative in Spain. Vallejo is a regular columnist for El País and Heraldo de Aragón, and she is the author of two novels, three collections of essays, articles, and short fiction, and two children’s books. She lives in Spain.
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Charlotte Whittle’s work has appeared in The Literary Review, Los Angeles Times, Guernica, BOMB, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her translations include novels by Jorge Comensal, Elisa Victoria, and Norah Lange; her most recent translation is Papyrus, the international bestseller by Irene Vallejo. She lives in England and New York.
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Natasha Wimmer is an American translator who is best known for her translations of Roberto Bolaño’s works from Spanish to English. Wimmer attended Harvard University and studied Spanish literature. After college she began to work for Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, as an assistant and later as a managing editor, where she translated Bolaño’s Savage Detectives which was incredibly well-received. She has since gone on to translate several of Bolaño’s works as well as the work of Mario Vargas Llosa. She is the recipient of the NEA Translation Grant, PEN Translation Prize, National Book Award’s Best Novel of the Year, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and teaches translation seminars at Princeton University. She lives in New York City.
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Kaija Straumanis is a second-generation Latvian-American, born and raised in the great state of Minnesota. She reads, edits, translates, and photographs. She lives in New York, and in addition to working as the editorial director of Open Letter Books and production manager of Dalkey Archive Press, she is working on several translation projects, including Forest Daughters, ed. Sanita Reinsone, for which she received a 2020 NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, and The River by Laura Vinogradova, which is forthcoming from Open Letter Books in 2024.
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CHICAGO
Winifred Bird is a journalist, translator and the author of Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods. Winifred translates Japanese nonfiction and fiction and edits translations from Japanese. She is a member of the Third Coast Translator’s Collective, an international community of literary translators in the Chicago area, a member of the Society of Editors, Writers, and Translators, and a winner of the 3rd JLPP International Translation Competition, for translations of texts by Ekuni Kaori and Tereda Torahiko. [Photo credit: John Bird]
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Pol Galofre (Barcelona, 1987) holds a degree in Film and Audiovisuals from ESCAC. He is one of the coordinators of the Culture Trans project with Miquel Missé, with whom he has also edited the book Trans Policies: An anthology of texts from North American Trans Studies.
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Alba Girons Masot is Director of the Catalan and Basque Language Programs, Associate Senior Instructional Professor, and Chair of the RLL Language Program Directors Committee at the University of Chicago. Alba started teaching at the age of 18, and hasn't stopped since.
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Jason Grunebaum's translations from Hindi include Uday Prakash’s The Girl with the Golden Parasol, The Walls of Delhi, and, with Ulrike Stark, Manzoor Ahtesham’s The Tale of the Missing Man. He has been awarded the Global Humanities Translation Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a PEN/Heim Translation Grant. He teaches Hindi language and literary translation at the University of Chicago and is co-director of the South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) Project. [Photo credit: Paul Crisanti]
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Kristen Renee Miller is the director and editor-in-chief at Sarabande Books. A poet and translator, she is a 2023 NEA Fellow and the translator of two books of poetry from the French by Ilnu First Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, AIGA, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, and the American Literary Translators Association. Her work can be found widely, including in Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, and Best New Poets. [Photo credit: Kertis Creative]
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Bel Olid is a writer, translator, and feminist activist. They teach at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona and University of Chicago. Their first novel, Una terra solitària, won the Documenta Prize in 2010, and Crida ben fort, Estela! was awarded the 2009 Qwerty Prize for Best Children’s Book of the Year. Alongside their fiction, which confronts issues of gender, sexuality and abuse, they have explored feminist struggles in the 21st century through several essays and have translated, amongst others, Judith Butler’s seminal Gender Trouble. [Photo credit: Courtesy of the Author]
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Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. Alta’s translations from Italian and German include works by Giorgio Agamben, Dana Grigorcea, Alexander Kluge, Aldo Novarese, and Martin Mosebach. Alta’s latest books are Juli Zeh’s novel New Year—finalist for the 2022 PEN America Translation Prize as well as the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize—and Mithu Sanyal’s novel Identitti. [Photo credit: Audre Rae]
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Ellen Vayner is a Russian-born literary translator and a Russian Studies professor from Cleveland. She has translated (with Brian Baer) several books published by Europa Editions. Levan Berdzenishvili’s Sacred Darkness: The Last Days of the Gulag and Sasha Filipenko’s Red Crosses were nominated for the EBRD Literature Prize in the UK; the latter was shortlisted in 2022. Mikhail Shevelev’s Not Russian is the most recent publication. Her other works include Mother Tongue by Yevgeniy Fiks (Pleshka Presse, 2018) and Ainur Karim’s play Chins Up! Shoulders Back! (with Slava Faybysh), which won the 2022 ALTA Plays in Translation Contest. Her latest book, Valery Panyushkin’s The Hour of the Wolf, is coming out this winter. [Photo credit: Courtesy of the Translator]
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Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician prose and poetry. His work has appeared in Asymptote, Best European Fiction 2019, PRISM International, Cagibi, Your Impossible Voice, Nashville Review, The Brooklyn Rail, InTranslation, and the Portico of Galician Literature, with work forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Copper Nickel, and ANMLY. His translation of Carlos Casares’s novel, His Excellency, came out from Small Stations Press in 2017.
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