Translators
Browse through all of the translators in WLT.
Grace Sewell is an honors Russian and Spanish double major at Swarthmore College and an emerging literary translator. She is also an alumna of the Yiddish Book Center’s 2021 Steiner Program and a 2020 Eugene M. Lang research fellow.
Fatemeh Shams’s third collection, When They Broke Down the Door, translated by Dick Davis, received the 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award. She won the Jaleh Esfahani poetry prize for the best young Iranian poet in 2012.
Laura Shanahan is a postgraduate student in the MA in Literary Translation Studies program at the University of Warwick. She has worked in the publishing industry and as a freelance translator and editor. She lives in Oxford, where she previously studied French and Italian, spending a year abroad in Naples, Italy.
Bela Shayevich is a Soviet-American writer and translator.
Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Moazzam Sheikh writes and translates fiction in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, and English. He is author of two collections of short stories and was involved in founding the United States’ only South Asian literary press, Weavers Press.
Peter Sherwood taught at universities in the UK and US for more than forty years, retiring as distinguished professor of Hungarian language and culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. His translations from Hungarian have been appearing since the late 1960s. With his wife, Julia Sherwood, he also translates from Slovak and Czech.
Shook’s most recent book-length translations include Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s Room in Rome, a finalist for the PEN Award. Their forthcoming books include a new translation of Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon and a collection of Spanish-language poetry, Atlas estelar.
Photo by Orna ItamarLyor Shternberg (b. 1967) is a poet, translator, and a teacher of literature. His seventh volume of poetry, The Bread, the Salt (collecting twenty years of writing), was published recently.
Yvette Siegert is a Latinx poet, translator, and Ledbury Critic currently completing a doctorate in Colombian literature and intellectual history at Merton College, University of Oxford. As a translator she has been a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and winnner of the Best Translated Book Award.
Andrew Simes (b. 1981) studied at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. Of the latest generation of a Levantine family that settled in Izmir, Turkey, in 1815, he has lived in Izmir for fifteen years and works as a freelance translator and English-language and IELTS tutor.
Daniel Simon is a poet, essayist, translator, and WLT’s assistant director and editor in chief. His WLT centennial anthology, A Compass on the Navigable Sea: 100 Years of World Literature, is forthcoming from Restless Books in spring 2026.
Nidhi Singh is a doctoral student in comparative literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her essays have appeared in The Kalahari Review and The Bangalore Review. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University.
Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is the author of Bare Soul and three collections of poems in Hindi. Her work is widely published and translated into many languages.
Nisrine Slitine El Mghari is an assistant professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies as well as French and Francophone Studies at the University of Kentucky.
Boris Smirnov holds an MA from the University of Illinois Chicago and translates from German and Spanish as well as from his native Russian. He has translated fourteen novels across a variety of genres, numerous short stories, and a handful of screenplays. He is also the English translator for DOSh, a human rights magazine dedicated to the North Caucasus region.
Brian Sneeden is a PhD candidate in translation studies at the University of Connecticut. Peter Constantine, director of the UConn Program in Literary Translation, is his sponsoring professor. Sneeden’s collection of poems, Last City, was recently published by Carnegie Mellon University Press (2018), and his translation of Giannisi’s Homerica (World Poetry Books) was published in 2017. He currently serves as senior editor of New Poetry in Translation.
Pat Snidvongs is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Princeton University, with particular interests in classics and linguistics.
Photo by Paul BraunsD. P. Snyder is a bilingual writer, poet, and translator between English and Spanish. Her book-length works include Arrhythmias, by Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (2022), and Scary Story, by Alberto Chimal (2023). Her translations have been anthologized, notably in Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa (2020), Daughters of Latin America (2023), and Constellation (2024). She is an editorial board member at Reading in Translation and recent co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee.
Dorothy Potter Snyder (b. 1960, Philadelphia) is a writer and translator who has published work by Mónica Lavín (Mexico), Almudena Sánchez (Spain), and Juan Carlos Garvayo, among others. Her translation of Lavín’s collection Meaty Pleasures was released by Katakana Editores in September 2021.
D. P. Snyder (b. 1960, Philadelphia) is a bilingual writer and translator from Spanish. Her translations have appeared in the Sewanee Review, Exile Quarterly, Two Lines Journal, World Literature Today, and Review: Literature and Art of the Americas. She is a contributor to many magazines and is on the editorial board at Reading in Translation. Her first book-length translation is Meaty Pleasures, a collection by Mexican writer Mónica Lavín (2021).
Emily Socha is a translator of Spanish and Latin American poetry. She is currently focusing on the works of younger peninsular Spanish poets.
Paul Sohar has published seventeen books of translations earning three prizes, the latest being Silver Pirouettes (2017). His magazine publications include Agni, Rattle, Rhino, and others.
Ivan Sokolov is a poet, translator, and critic from St. Petersburg and a PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley. The author of five books of poetry, he has translated G. M. Hopkins, Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and other writers into Russian, and the poetry of Natalia Azarova into English. He serves as a contributing editor at GRIOZA, where in 2020 he curated an international festschrift for the centenary of Paul Celan’s birth.
Keegan Sparks graduated from the University of Kansas in 2019 with a degree in East Asian languages and cultures, with a concentration in Chinese language and culture.
Troy E. Spier is a professor of English and linguistics at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. He earned an MA and PhD in linguistics at Tulane University, a bachelor’s degree in English/secondary education at Kutztown University, and an AA in general studies at Reading Area Community College.
Photo by Kevin GuttingIlan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and publisher of Restless Books. His latest books are I Love My Selfie (Duke, with Adál) and Quixote: The Novel and the World (Norton). He has translated into English the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Rubén Darío, Jorge Luis Borges, and Pablo Neruda, among others. He is also the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry (2011).
