Sholom Aleichem (1859–1916), one of the fathers of modern Yiddish literature, was born Shalom Rabinovitz in Pereiaslav, in what is now Ukraine. He began his literary career writing in Hebrew and Russian and published his first work in Yiddish under his pen name in 1883. He went on to publish his fiction in newspapers as […]

Maya Arad is the author of eleven books of Hebrew fiction, as well as studies in literary criticism and linguistics. Born in Israel in 1971, she received a PhD in linguistics from University College London and for the past twenty years has lived in California where she is currently writer in residence at Stanford University’s […]

Yair Assulin, born in 1986, studied philosophy and history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Drive is the first of two novels he has written and for which he won Israel’s Ministry of Culture Prize and the Sapir Prize for debut fiction. He has been awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for authors, writes a […]

Manuel Astur is a Spanish author and journalist selected as “One of the Ten Most Interesting New Voices in Europe” by a European Union literary project. He has written novels, short story collections, and poetry, and teaches literature at the Escuela de Letras de Gijón.  

Pauline Baer de Perignon has co-authored film scripts and directed writing workshops in Paris where she lives. The Vanished Collection is her first book.

Jonathan Barrow was born in 1947, north of London. His promising career as a writer and artist was cut short when he was killed at age twenty-two in a car crash alongside his fiancée, two weeks before they were to be married. The manuscript was discovered in Barrow’s office drawer the day after his death.

Clara Beaudoux is a Paris-based journalist for the France Info news network. The Madeleine Project has been wildly popular in France. You can follow her on Twitter at @Clarabdx.  

Jean-Philippe Blondel was born in 1964 in Troyes, France, where he lives as an author and English teacher. His novel The 6:41 to Paris has been acclaimed in both the United States and Europe.

Andrzej Bursa was born in 1932 in Krakow, Poland, and died twenty-five years later of a heart attack. In his brief lifetime he composed some of the most original Polish writing of the 20th century. Killing Auntie is his only novel. His brilliant career and tragic early death established him as a cult figure among […]

Piero Chiara (1913-1986) was a leading Italian author of the twentieth century who won over a dozen literary prizes and whose work is marked by psychological depth, melancholy humor and a grasp of the essence of everyday life. The Bishop’s Bedroom is the most celebrated of his many acclaimed novels.

Philippe Costamagna is a specialist in sixteenth-century Italian painting and director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Ajaccio, Corsica. He is the author of a book on the Florentine Renaissance painter Pontormo.  

Anjet Daanje, the pseudonym of Anjet den Boer, who was born in 1965, writes novels, short stories, and screenplays. Her novels have received the top literary prizes in her native Netherlands. The Remembered Soldier won the prestigious 2020 F. Bordewijk Prize, the Best Book of Groningen Prize, and was longlisted for the 2020 Libris Literature […]

Margriet de Moor made her fiction debut in 1988 after pursuing a career as a classical singer. She has written many novels including The Virtuoso, The Kreuzer Sonata, The Storm and The Duke of Egypt. Her work has been translated from Dutch into twenty-four languages.  

Cécile Desprairies is a specialist in Germanic civilization and a historian of the Nazi occupation of France. The author of several historical works about the occupation and the Vichy regime, she was born in Paris in 1957. The Propagandist is her first novel.

Dominique Fabre, born in 1960, writes about people living on society’s margins. He is a lifelong resident of Paris. His previous novel, The Waitress Was New, has also been translated into English.

Milena Michiko Flašar was born in 1980, the daughter of a Japanese mother and an Austrian father. She lives in Vienna. I Called Him Necktie won the 2012 Austrian Alpha Literature Prize.  

Edgardo Franzosini, born in 1952 near Lake Como, is the author of five novels. The Animal Gazer won two distinguished Italian literary awards in 2016, the Premio Comisso and the Premio Dessi. He lives in Milan.

Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) was one of the principal voices of the “Boom,” the period in 1960s and 1970s when Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar came to global prominence. Born in Panama City into a Mexican diplomatic family, Fuentes published his first novel Where the Air Is Clear in 1958 to immediate acclaim. […]

Marjana Gaponenko was born in 1981 in Odessa, Ukraine. She fell in love with the German language as a young girl, and began writing in German when she was sixteen. She has a degree in German studies from Odessa University. Who is Martha? is her second novel and was awarded the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize […]

Stênio Gardel was born in 1980 in the rural northeast of Brazil. The Words That Remain is his first novel and won the National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Adrien Goetz is a novelist who teaches art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. He is editor of Grande Galerie, the quarterly magazine of the Louvre Museum.

Anna Goldenberg, born in 1989 in Vienna, studied psychology at the University of Cambridge and journalism at Columbia University. She worked at the Jewish newspaper The Forward in New York before returning to Vienna where she now contributes to various newspapers.

Yitzhak Gormezano Goren was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1941 and immigrated to Israel as a child. A playwright and a novelist, Gormezano Goren has an MFA in theater directing from Brooklyn College. He cofounded the Kedem Stage Theater in Tel Aviv in 1982 and directed it for thirty years. Gormezano Goren is a winner of the […]

Moshtari Hilal is a visual artist, writer, and curator based in Hamburg and Berlin. Born in Afghanistan, she pursued Islamic studies and political science in Hamburg, Berlin, and London.

Marek Hlasko, the James Dean of Eastern Europe, wrote several novels about Israel. Killing the Second Dog is one of them.

Marina Jarre (1925-2016) was born in Riga to a Latvian Jewish father and an Italian Protestant mother. She spent her childhood in Latvia until 1935, when her parents separated and she moved to Italy to live with her maternal grandparents, among devout, French-speaking Protestants in a community southwest of Turin. Jarre wrote over a dozen […]

JAMES JOYCE (1882–1941) became one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century with just four books of fiction, including the modernist masterpiece Ulysses (1922), along with two poetry collections and a play, Exiles (1918). Joyce’s early life, described in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), sunk rapidly from luxury to relative squalor. Though he left […]

Walter Kappacher (1938-2024) was an Austrian novelist who won many German language literary awards including the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize. He wrote short stories and novels as well as radio and screenplays, and lived near Salzburg.

Faysal Khartash, a winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Arabic Literature, is a leading Syrian author. He lives in his native Aleppo, has written several novels and works as a schoolteacher while contributing to Syrian newspapers.

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian author best known for a six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle.

Pierre Le-Tan was an internationally renowned French illustrator who designed whimsical and stylish covers for The New Yorker and images for other magazines including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as book covers for works by his friend Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. Le-Tan died in 2019 at age sixty-nine. A year and a half later, […]

Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. Lebedev is a poet, essayist, and journalist. His novels have been translated into twenty languages and have received great acclaim in the English-speaking world. The New York Review of Books has hailed Lebedev […]

Vladimir Lorchenkov, writer and journalist, was born in Chisinau, Moldova, the son of a Soviet army officer, in 1979.

Pedro Mairal made a splash with his debut novel, Una noche con Sabrina Love, which tells the story of an 18-year-old boy who wins a night with a porn star of his dreams.

Charif Majdalani, born in Lebanon in 1960, is often likened to a Lebanese Proust. Majdalani lived in France from 1980 to 1993 and now teaches French literature at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. The original French version of his novel Moving the Palace won the 2008 François Mauriac Prize from the Académie Française as well as the Prix […]

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was among the most renowned novelists of the twentieth century and received the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature. His first novel, Buddenbrooks, was published in 1901 and found great success in Germany. Mann, however, was deprived of German citizenship in 1936 by the Nazi regime and eventually sought refuge in the United […]

Ronit Matalon (1959-2017) was the author of nine novels and a liberal social activist. The daughter of Egyptian immigrants to Israel, she worked as a journalist for the newspaper Haaretz and reported from the West Bank and Gaza. Her last book, And the Bride Closed the Door, was awarded Israel’s prestigious Brenner Prize, the day before Matalon’s death at age 58. 

Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942) was born in Kiev into a Jewish banking family. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, she moved to France and wrote in French. Némirovsky was baptized as a Catholic in 1939, three years before her arrest and deportation to Auschwitz where she died. Her best-known novel, Suite Française, was published posthumously and translated into […]

Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998) is one of the most celebrated and original Italian writers of the 20th century. Neapolitan Chronicles brought her widespread acclaim in her native country when it was first published in 1953 and won the prestigious Premio Viareggio.

Pitigrilli was the pseudonym of Dino Segre, born in Turin in 1893 to a well-to-do Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris during the 1920s, and under his pen name became equally celebrated and notorious for a series of audacious and subversive books that were translated into sixteen languages.

Alexander Pschera, born in 1964, has published several books on the Internet and media. He studied German, music and philosophy at Heidelberg University. He lives near Munich where he writes for the German magazine Cicero as well as for German radio.

Alexis Ragougneau is a playwright and The Madonna of Notre Dame is his first novel. He has worked in Notre Dame Cathedral helping monitor tourist crowds and knows well its infinite secrets and the forgotten souls who linger in its darkest corners.

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay. His allegorical novel about the birth of Indian independence, Midnight’s Children, won the 1981 Booker Prize. After his fourth book, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988, he became the subject of assassination attempts and a fatwa calling for his death, issued by Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini.

Igiaba Scego is an Italian novelist and journalist. She was born in Rome in 1974 to Somali parents who took refuge in Italy following a coup d’état in their native country, where her father served as foreign minister.

Agur Schiff, born in 1955 in Tel Aviv, is a graduate of Saint Martin’s School of Art in London and the Rijks Art Academy in Amsterdam. He has worked as a filmmaker, started writing fiction in the early 1990s, and has published two short story collections and six novels. Schiff is professor emeritus at the […]

Salvatore Settis is an archaeologist and art historian who has been the director of the Getty Research Institute of Los Angeles and the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. He is chairman of the Louvre Museum’s Scientific Council and author of several books on art history as well as a regular contributor to major Italian newspapers […]

Dana Shem-Ur lived in Paris for three years and obtained a master’s degree in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure. She is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Tel Aviv University who translates from French, Italian, and Chinese into Hebrew.  

Lea Singer is a German cultural historian and a novelist who uses a pseudonym for her fictional works. Under her legal name of Eva Gesine Baur, she has authored biographies of Frédéric Chopin and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. She has also written novels inspired by the lives of pianist Paul Wittgenstein and painter Caspar David Friedrich.

Ersi Sotiropoulos has written fifteen books of fiction and poetry. Her work has been translated into many languages, and has been twice awarded Greece’s National Book Prize as well as her country’s Book Critics’ Award and the Athens Academy Prize. What’s Left of the Night won the 2017 Prix Méditerranée Étranger  in France.

Hilde Spiel was the grande dame of 20th century Austrian literature.

Martin Suter, born in Zurich in 1948, is a novelist, screenwriter and newspaper columnist. He has written a dozen novels, many of them best-sellers in Europe and translated into 32 languages. Suter lives with his family in Zurich.

Teffi (1872 – 1952) was the pseudonym of Nedezhda Buchinskaya née Lokhvitskaya. She was a humorist and mainstay of the satirical magazine Satiricon. She left Russia after the October Revolution of 1917, going first to Istanbul, then Paris, where she settled until the end of her life. Teffi was prolific and published many stories in […]

Hans von Trotha is a German historian, novelist and journalist who spent ten years as editorial director of the Nicolai publishing house in Berlin.

Klaus Wivel is a Danish journalist who has been the New York correspondent for Weekendavisen, one of Denmark’s most prestigious newspapers. He has written on a wide range of topics, with a focus on Israel-Palestine and the Middle East.

Shemi Zarhin is a novelist, film director and screenwriter who has created some of the most critically-acclaimed and award-winning films in contemporary Israeli cinema.

Alison Anderson is a novelist and translator of literature from French. Among the authors she has translated are J. M. G. Le Clézio, Christian Bobin, Muriel Barbery, and Amélie Nothomb. She has lived in northern California and currently lives in a village in Switzerland.

Georg Bauer is a Vienna-based translator and editor. He is the 2021 recipient of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York Translation Prize for Palace of Flies.    

Antonina W. Bouis is one of the leading translators of Russian literature working today. She has translated over eighty works from authors such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Sakharov, Sergei Dovlatov, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Bouis, previously executive director of the Soros Foundation in the former USSR, lives in New York City.

Nick Caistor is a translator, journalist and author of non-fiction books. He has translated some 40 books from Spanish and Portuguese. These include works by Paulo Coelho, Alan Pauls, Martin Kohan, Eduardo Mendoza, Juan Marsé and Manuel Vázquez Montalban.

Jessica Cohen shared the 2017 Man Booker International Prize with author David Grossman for her translation of A Horse Walks into a Bar. She has translated works by Amos Oz, Etgar Keret, Dorit Rabinyan, Ronit Matalon, Nir Baram, and others.

Howard Curtis has almost thirty years of experience as a literary translator from French, Italian and Spanish. Among the many authors he has translated are Flaubert, Balzac, Pirandello, Simenon, Filippo Bologna, Carole Martinez, Paolo Sorrentino and Santiago Gamboa.

Sheila Dickie studied German and drama at Bristol University and has taught German. She has translated a novel by Claude Michelet from French, and lives in Henley-on-Thames, England.

Karen Emmerich has published a dozen book-length translations of modern Greek poetry and prose. She was awarded the 2019 National Translation Award for What’s Left of the Night by Ersi Sotiropoulos. Emmerich teaches comparative literature at Princeton.

Jill Foulston is the translator of novels by Erri de Luca, Augusto de Angelis and Piero Chiara. She lives in London.

Edward Gauvin has received prizes and fellowships including those awarded by PEN America, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright program. His work has won the John Dryden Translation Prize and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. He has translated over 200 graphic novels.

Ann Goldstein has translated The Neapolitan Novels and other works by Elena Ferrante, as well as writings by Primo Levi, Giacomo Leopardi and Pier Paolo Pasolini. She is a former editor at The New Yorker.

Yardenne Greenspan is a fiction writer and translator, born in Tel Aviv to a bilingual family.

Katherine Gregor has translated works by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Andrea Japp, Luigi Pirandello, Carlo Goldoni and Alexander Pushkin.

Mark Kline is an American writer and translator living in Copenhagen. His translations include kingsize, a prize-winning collection of Danish avant-garde poetry by Mette Moestrup, as well as children’s books, essays, and short stories.

Elisabeth Lauffer is the recipient of the 2014 Gutekunst Translation Prize. After graduating from Wesleyan University she lived in Berlin where she worked as a commercial translator and then obtained a master’s in education from Harvard.

Natasha Lehrer has translated books by Georges Bataille, Robert Desnos, Victor Segalen, Chantal Thomas and the Dalai Lama. Her co-translation of Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden won the 2017 Scott Moncrieff Prize.

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a Brazilian writer and literary translator who lives in St. Louis. Her translation of The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel won the National Book Award for Translated Literature.

David McKay is an award-winning translator of Dutch fiction and nonfiction. Born and educated in the United States, he has lived in and around The Hague since 1997.    

Jenny McPhee has translated works by Giacomo Leopardi, Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Paolo Maurensig and Pope John Paul II.

Tomasz Mirkowicz, translator of American and British fiction, was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1953. Among others, he translated the works of Ken Kesey, George Orwell, Jerzy Kosinski, Harry Matthews, Robert Coover, Alan Sillitoe and Charles Bukowski.

Michael F. Moore has translated works by Alessandro Manzoni, Alberto Moravia and Primo Levi. Prior to becoming an interpreter at the Permanent Mission of Italy to the United Nations, he studied sculpture at the Brera Academy in Milan.

Steph Morris studied fine art at Goldsmiths’ College, London, and history of art at Chelsea College of Art. He has translated the diaries of East German writer Brigitte Reimann as well as nonfiction books about Joseph Beuys and Pina Bausch, and has been a translator in residence at the Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium, in Straelen, Germany.

André Naffis-Sahely is a translator and poet. He was born in Venice and grew up in Abu Dhabi.

Wiesiek Powaga is a translator and author. Among his translations are letters of Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz, an anthology of Polish fantasy writing, poetry, drama, and a novel by Andrzej Stasiuk. He has written for television and trained as a make-up artist and a wig-maker at the Warsaw Opera House. 

Alta L. Price translates from Italian and German, and was awarded the 2013 Gutekunst Prize. Her publications include work by Corrado Augias, Dana Grigorcea, Jürgen Holstein, and Martin Mosebach.

Jamie Richards is a translator based in Milan. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Her translations include Igort’s Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks, Giovanni Orelli’s Walaschek’s Dream, and Jellyfish by Giancarlo Pastore.

Christine Shuttleworth grew up in London, the daughter of the German-language writers Hilde Spiel and Peter de Mendelssohn, who emigrated there in 1936.

Arabella Spencer studied German and phi­losophy at King’s College London and literary translation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. She has lived in Munich and Seville and currently lives in London.

Ross Ufberg is a writer and translator of literature from Russian and Polish. A graduate of Hamilton College, he is a PhD Candidate at Columbia University in the Slavic Department, and a cofounder of New Vessel Press.

Claire Wadie has a Masters in Translation from the University of Bristol and won the Peirene Stevns Translation Prize for Of Saints and Miracles by Manuel Astur. She has taught French and Spanish in British secondary schools for many years.

Max Weiss teaches the history of the modern Middle East at Princeton University. He has translated books by Nihad Sirees, Dunya Mikhail and Samar Yazbek.

Michael Z. Wise is the publisher and cofounder of New Vessel Press.

Frank Wynne is an award-winning translator from French and Spanish, who has translated works by Michel Houellebecq, Claude Lanzmann, Frédéric Beigbeder and Yasmina Khadra. He is the author of I Was Vermeer, a nonfiction book about art forger Han van Meegeren.