Best European Fiction 2013

Translator Biographies

ANNA ASLANYAN is a journalist and translator. She co-edits 3:AM magazine and writes for various publications, mainly on books and the arts. Her translations into Russian include works of fiction by Tom McCarthy, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Mavis Gallant, and Zadie Smith. She has translated a number of essays and short stories from Russian into English.

SHUSHAN AVAGYAN is the translator from Russian of Energy of Delusion, Bowstring, and A Hunt for Optimism by Viktor Shklovsky, and, from Armenian, I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian. She currently teaches at the American University of Armenia.

FLORIN BICAN has published English translations in Britain, Ireland, the United States, Singapore, and Romania. His translations from English into Romanian include Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Since 2006 Florin Bican has been in charge of the Romanian Cultural Institute program “Translators in the Making.”

ALISTAIR IAN BLYTH lives in Bucharest and has translated fiction, poetry, and philosophy by writers from Romania and the Republic of Moldova. The authors he has translated include Max Blecher, Gellu Naum, Ion Creanga, Filip Florian, Lucian Dan Teodorovici, Bogdan Suceava, Iulian Ciocan, and Constantin Noica.

CHRISTOPHER BUXTON first came to Bulgaria in 1977 as an English teacher. He has had three novels published in Bulgaria: Far from the Danube, Prudence and the Red Baron, and Radoslava and the Viking Prince. He has translated a significant number of classic and contemporary Bulgarian texts including new work for the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. He maintains a website at www.christopherbuxton.com.

MARGARET JULL COSTA has been a literary translator for over twenty years, translating, among others, Javier Marías, Eça de Queiroz, and Bernardo Atxaga. Her work has brought her various prizes, the most recent of which was the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Elephant’s Journey by José Saramago.

VICTORIA CRIBB was born in England but lived in Iceland for several years. Her translations from Icelandic include Stone Tree by Gyrðir Elíasson and From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón, which was shortlisted for the UK Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012. She is currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of Cambridge.

JENNIFER CROFT is a writer and translator of Spanish, Polish, and Ukrainian. She is a founding editor of The Buenos Aires Review.

ROBERT FERGUSON is a renowned translator of Scandinavian literature. He has also written biographies of Nobel Laureate-winning author Knut Hamsun, author Henry Miller, and playwright Henrik Ibsen.

WILL FIRTH was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. Since 1991 he has been living in Berlin, Germany, where he works as a freelance translator of literature and the humanities. He translates from Russian, Macedonian, and all variants of Serbo-Croatian.

MARGITA GAILITIS was born in Riga, Latvia, and grew up in Canada. In 1998 she returned to Latvia to work on a Canadian International Development Agency-sponsored project translating Latvian laws into English. Her poetry has been published in Canada and the US, and she is the recipient of Ontario Arts and Canada Council awards. In 2011, she was awarded the Order of the Three Stars by the President of Latvia.

ROGER GREENWALD, an American poet and translator based in Toronto, has won the CBC Literary Award twice (poetry, travel literature). His books include Connecting Flight (poems); and the translations Through Naked Branches: Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas; North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen, winner of the Lewis Galantière Award; Picture World, by Niels Frank; and A Story about Mr. Silberstein, a novel by Erland Josephson.

JEAN HARRIS has published fiction, literary criticism, translations, book reviews, and literary dispatches. She won a translation grant from UC-I’s International Center for Writing and Translation for her work on Ştefan Bănulescu’s Mistretii erau blazi. She has directed the Observer Translation Project at translations.observatorcultural.ro, which translates Romanian fiction into numerous languages.

CELIA HAWKESWORTH is emerita Senior Lecturer in Serbian and Croatian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London. She has published numerous articles and several books on Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian literature, including the studies Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West, Voices in the Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia, and Zagreb: A Cultural History. She has translated numerous works from Serbo-Croatian, including Vedrana Rudan’s Night and several books by Dubravka Ugresic.

HILDI HAWKINS is a writer and translator and the London Editor of Books from Finland. She is also the editor of things magazine, a journal of writings about objects, their pasts, presents, and futures.

ELIZABETH HEIGHWAY is a literary and medical translator. She was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Chicago, and holds an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Birmingham. She translates from Georgian and French, and is the editor and translator of Dalkey Archive Press’s Contemporary Georgian Fiction.

AARON KERNER is a freelance writer and translator from German, French, and Spanish.

AMY KERNER lives in Rhode Island, where she is working toward a PhD in Modern European History at Brown University. She translates from German and Spanish.

VIJA KOSTOFFF is a linguist by education, and a language teacher, writer, and editor by profession. She has been collaborating with Margita Gailitis for more than ten years in translating the novels, short storeis, plays, film scripts, and poetry of many of Latvia's major writers. Born in Latvia, she now resides in Niagra on the Lake, Ontario, Canada where she exercises her secondary passions for gardening and painting.

SOILA LEHTONEN is a journalist and theater critic, and currently Editor-in-Chief of Books from Finland. She edited a collection of writings about the city of Helsinki together with Hildi Hawkins, Helsinki: A Literary Companion.

DAVID LIMON translates literature for children and adults from Slovenian into English. His translations include the prize winning novels Fužine Blues by Andrej Skubic and Iqball Hotel by Boris Kolar. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Translation at the University of Ljubljana.

ILMAR LEHTPERE is Kristiina Ehin’s official English-language translator. He has translated nine books by her, both prose and poetry, including the Poetry Society Popescu Prize winner The Drums of Silence (2007) and the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation The Scent of Your Shadow (2010). He has also translated her dramatic works and radio broadcasts. His translations of Kristiina Ehin’s work appear regularly in leading English-language literary magazines and his collaboration with her is ongoing.

OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK was born in Lviv, Ukraine. She moved to the United States when she was fifteen years old. She began translating Ukrainian and Russian poetry as a student at Bryn Mawr College, and has also published two books of her own poetry in Ukrainian: Gifts to the Host (2005) and The Chase (2008). In 2004 and 2007 she was the recipient of prestigious Ukrainian literary awards for young authors; since 2006, she has been living in Chicago and pursuing a doctorate in philosophy at Northwestern University.

RHETT MCNEIL has published numerous translations from Portuguese and Spanish, including short fiction by Machado de Assis and Enrique Vila-Matas, and novels by Gonçalo M. Tavares, A. G. Porta, and António Lobo Antunes.

RACHEL MCNICHOLL studied, lived and worked in Switzerland and Germany before returning to her native Ireland. Her career path has covered academic research, teaching translation at university, journalism, in-house book editing, and literary translation. Recent short-story translations from German include “England, I Set Foot on You in Heels” by Lydia Mischkulnig, in Zwei Wochen England, and “Belyed: A Fishy Story” by Gabriele Haefs in Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. She has also translated work by Klaus Modick, Nadja Spiegel, Yoko Tawada, and Sigrid Weigel.

NIKOLCHE MICKOSKI teaches at the Faculty of Philology at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje and translates from English, German and Serbian. His translations include, among others, Ford’s The Good Soldier, and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom! into Macedonian, as well as Simon Drakul’s The White Valley and Žarko Kujundžiski’s Spectator into English.

MAX POPELYSH-ROSOCHYNSKY was born in 1986 in Simferopol, Crimea. He moved to the United States in 2006. He is currently writing a dissertation about Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry and criticism at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. He is also working on his first book of poetry in Russian.

MARILYA VETETO REESE is Professor of German at Northern Arizona University. She was among the first US Germanists to interview and write about Turkish-German writers. The recipient of Fulbright, DAAD, and Goethe Institut support, Reese works with, translates, and has numerous publications on contemporary German authors such as Zehra Çirak and Kemal Kurt as well as on Holocaust poet Hilda Stern Cohen and on foreign language pedagogy.

BRENDAN RILEY was born in Dunkirk, New York. He has worked for years as a teacher, translator, writer, and editor. Among other works, he has translated Álvaro Enrigue’s Hypothermia, Carlos Fuentes’s The Great Latin American Novel, and Juan Filloy’s Faction, all for Dalkey Archive Press.

KATINA ROGERS holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado. In addition to translating contemporary francophone literature, she works on graduate education reform and emerging models of academic authoring and publishing at the Scholarly Communication Institute.

JULIA SHERWOOD was born and grew up in Bratislava, then Czechoslovakia. After studying English and Slavic languages and literature at universities in Cologne, Munich and London, she settled in the UK. Since moving to the US in 2008 she has worked as a freelance translator from Slovak, Czech, Polish and Russian. Her literary translations include Daniela Kapitánová’s Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book (from the Slovak), published in 2011, and Petra Procházková’s Freshta (from the Czech), published in November 2012.

GEORGE SZIRTES was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England as a refugee. He was brought up in London and studied Fine Art in London and Leeds. For his poetry, he has won the Faber Memorial prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He has also worked extensively as a translator of poems, novels, plays, and essays and has won various prizes and awards in this sphere. His own work has been translated into numerous languages. He lives near Norwich with his wife.

ELENA MITRESKA WEISS resides in New York City and had worked for two renowned publishers, HarperCollins and Penguin Group (USA), focusing on author contracts. She has worked to scout Macedonian authors for publication in English, including Goce Smilevski. She was educated at Hunter College, New York City, and Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia.

JAYDE WILL is a lecturer at the Department of Translation and Interpretation Studies at Vilnius University. His translations of Estonian, Lithuanian, and Russian poetry have appeared in a number of anthologies. He has also translated Lithuanian plays for the London stage. He splits his time between Vilnius and Tartu.

JEFFREY ZUCKERMAN works in book publishing. He holds a degree in English with honors from Yale University, where he studied English literature, creative writing, and translation. He has translated several Francophone authors, from Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Vassilis Alexakis to Édouard Levé and Frédéric Beigbeder.