Translators

Kareem James Abu-Zeid is an award-winning translator, editor, writer, and scholar. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Martin Aitken is a full-time translator of Scandinavian literature. His translation of Josefine Klougart’s One of Us Is Sleeping is published by Open Letter. He is currently translating the sixth book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle from Norwegian with Don Bartlett.

Aron Aji is director of the literary translation MFA program at the University of Iowa and past president of the American Literary Translators Association. A native of Turkey, his translations include three book-length works by Bilge Karasu. Aji’s co-translation (with David Gramling) of Murathan Mungan’s Valor (Northwestern, 2021) received the 2020 Global Humanities Translation Prize. Aji’s translation of Ferid Edgu’s The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales (NYRB) is forthcoming in 2022.

Mayyu Ali is a young Rohingya poet, writer, and humanitarian activist who runs the Youth Empowerment Centre in the refugee camp at Cox’s Bazaar. His articles have also featured in Al Jazeera, Dhaka Tribune, and on CNN. Recently he published The Blossom, including some of his early poems, and distributed them around the camps. His poems have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation (special feature on Rohingya poetry) as well as the Best English and Light of English magazines in Myanmar.

Amna Ali has collaborated on books including A Letter from India: Contemporary Short Stories from Pakistan (Penguin India, 2004). She and her husband, Moazzam Sheikh, also co-translated stories by her father, Nadir Ali, from Punjabi into English (Weavers Press, 2022).

Sonia Alland translates from the French and the Catalan. Her works by the French writer Marie Bronsard include The Hermitage (2001) and The Legend (2013). Also from the French are the poems of Salah Al Hamdani: Baghdad Mon Amour (2008) and Baghdad, Adieu (2018). Translations from the Catalan include Portbou: A Catalan Memoir with Selected Stories from We, Women, by Maria Mercè Roca (2020), and selections from the work of the Catalan poets Salvador Espriu and Narcís Comadira.

Amanda Allard is an editorial intern at Big Sky Journal in Bozeman, Montana, where she writes about art and culture in the Northern Rockies. Amanda recently graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in French literature. The Lover is her first work of translation to be published.  

Marguerite Alley is a writer and translator from Durham, North Carolina, whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Witness, Carve, The Normal School, Ninth Letter, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. They received a BA in Spanish and Portuguese from NYU in 2022.

Alexis Almeida grew up in Chicago. Her recent translations include Florencia Castellano’s Monitored Properties (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Roberta Iannamico’s Wreckage (Toad Press). She currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches writing.

Elina Alter is a writer and translator. Her translations include Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love and Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound. She lives in New York.

Alejandro Álvarez Nieves (b. 1976, Río Piedras) is a poet, narrator, and translator. As a poet, he has published El proceso traductor (2012) and Quiebre de armas. As a translator, he collaborated with the rendering of Ntozake Shange’s Wild Beauty (2018) into Spanish.

Omnia Amin earned her PhD in modern and contemporary English literature from Queen Mary University of London. She is an author, translator, and professor at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University in Dubai, UAE.

Alison Anderson’s translations include The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, and works by Nobel laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio. She has also published three novels and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Translation Fellowship.

John Angliss, winner of the British Council’s Young Translator’s Prize for prose, has also translated works by Hakan Günday and Ahmet Ümit. 

Abayomi Animashaun is the author of three poetry collections and editor of three anthologies. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, and a poetry editor at the Comstock Review.

Brother Anthony of Taizé has published over forty volumes of translations of Korean literature and has received a number of awards. He has published ten volumes of work by Ko Un as well as recently published volumes of poetry by Jeong Ho-seung, Lee Seong-bok, and Ko Hyeong-ryeol. His Korean name is An Sonjae.

Sinan Antoon is a writer, scholar, and translator. His most recent work is The Book of Collateral Damage. He is an associate professor at New York University.

Anne Milano Appel has translated texts by a number of leading Italian authors for US and UK publishers. Her shorter works have appeared in a variety of literary journals. Her awards include the Italian Prose in Translation Award, the John Florio Prize for Italian Translation, and the Northern California Book Award for Translation.

Joana Araújo is a Portuguese-English bilingual content reviewer onsite at a Fortune 100 company in Cupertino, California. She received her bachelor’s degree from the Catholic University of Lisbon. In Portugal, she worked as a journalist and a TV production assistant. In 2002 she moved to San Francisco, where she earned her MA in broadcasting arts and was a graduate assistant at San Francisco State University.

Tóta Árnadóttir holds an MA in Faroese language and literature from the Faroese University, where she is currently an assistant professor in oral tradition.

Ljubica Arsovska is editor in chief of the long-established Skopje cultural magazine Kulturen Život and a distinguished literary translator. Her translations from English into Macedonian include books by Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Arundhati Roy, and Ian McEwan as well as plays by Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Ronald Howard, and Tennessee Williams. Her translations from Macedonian into English include works by Lidija Dimkovska, Liljana Dirjan, Risto Lazarov, and Tomislav Osmanli, among others.

Yazan Ashqar is an editor and translator based in New York City. He holds an MA in publishing and critical journalism from the New School.

David Auerbach is a faculty member of the Graduate Program of Translation at the University of Puerto Rico. A native of New York City, he has been a professional translator and editor for over twenty-five years, specializing in financial, legal, and literary texts as well as translation for the arts, working principally from four languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian).

Emad El-Din Aysha is an academic researcher, author, translator, and freelance journalist residing in Cairo, Egypt. He is a native speaker of both English and Arabic and a member of the Egyptian Writers’ Union and Egyptian Society for Science Fiction. He has one sci-fi anthology to his name (in Arabic) and one nonfiction book (in English) as a coauthor and coeditor, Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays (McFarland, 2022). He has also translated a variety of novels, in different genres, from Arabic to English by Egyptian authors.

Pshtewan Kamal Babakir is an archivist, filmmaker, and translator at Kashkul.

Rachel Tzvia Back is a poet and translator residing in the Galilee. Her Ruebner collection, In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner (Hebrew Union College Press / University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), was a finalist in 2015 for both the National Translation Award and the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. (Click here to read the WLT review.) Her essay “ ‘A Species of Magic’: The Role of Poetry in Protest and Truth-telling” appeared in the May 2014 issue of WLT.

Bryar Bajalan is an MA student in Middle East Studies at the University of Exeter, where he studies changing depictions of eroticism in the literature of Mosul before and after the Islamic State’s occupation. To the Ends of the Earth, his short documentary about nineteenth-century Baghdadi poet Jamil al-Zahawi, will premiere at the Translating Poetries Symposium this month in London.

Linda Frazee Baker’s (lindafrazeebaker.com) translations of works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Max Frisch, and Ödön von Horváth have appeared in the Guardian, Asymptote, Metamorphoses, Web Conjunctions, the Brooklyn Rail, and New England Review (forthcoming). She is assistant editor at No Man’s Land: New German Literature in English Translation.

Benjamin Balint is the translator of Hagit Grossman’s Trembling of the City (2015) and the author of Kaf ka’s Last Trial, forthcoming from Norton. He lives in Jerusalem.

Aida Bamia is Palestinian American and a retired faculty member at the University of Florida, where she taught Arabic language and literature, covering the Middle East and North Africa.