We are very proud of the authors, editors and translators who have spent countless hours creating our literary guides.
You can find information about many of these people under the individual titles in our catalog. Just click on a book to learn more. However, we plan eventually to provide this information here in one concise location. In addition, this section will provide links to our contributors' current web sites and blogs, allowing you to both absorb and interact with the work we present here.
Nancy Abraham Hall has been a member of the Wellesley College Spanish Department since 1989. Raised in a bilingual household in Mexico City, she holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic American Literature from Harvard University. Her most recent publications include articles on Borges, Boullosa, and Fuentes. Currently she is co-editing Studies in Honor of Enrique Anderson Imbert (Juan de la Cuesta) with Lanin A. Gyurko of the University of Arizona.
Jean Anderson teaches French at the University of Victoria, in Wellington, New Zealand. Since taking up literary translation in 2004, she has published two books translated from French to English and cotranslated three from English to French. She is the founding director of the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation, launched with an anthology of translated prose pieces from more than twenty countries and a dozen languages into New Zealand English, entitled Been There, Read That! Stories for the Armchair Traveller(2008).
Neil Blackadder translates drama and prose from German and French. His translation from German of The Sexual Neuroses of our Parents by Swiss playwright Lukas Bärfuss was staged by the Gate Theatre in London in September 2007 and published by Nick Hern Books. His translation of Rebekka Kricheldorf’s The Ballad of the Pine Tree Killer was featured in the electronic journal The Mercurian; his work has also appeared in journals including Two Lines, Chelsea, Stand, and Absinthe. Blackadder is also the author of Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience. He teaches theatre at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.
Peter Bush is the director of the British Centre for Literary Translation and vice president of the International Federation of Translators. He is editor of the translation journal In Other Words. He has translated novels and other works by a wide variety of writers. He won the 1994 ALTA Outstanding Literary Translation Award for his translation of The Old Man Who Read Love Stories by Luis Sepulveda and the 1997 Cervantes Institute's Ramon Valle-Inclan Prize for Literary Translation for his translation of Juan Goytisolo's The Marx Family Saga.
Dick Cluster is the author of the novels Return to Sender, Repulse Monkey, and Obligations of the Bone. His translation from Spanish has focused especially on Cuban writers, including story collections, novels, and anthologized stories by Aida Bahr, Alejandro Hernández Díaz, Pedro de Jesús, Antonio José Ponte, Abel Prieto, Mylene Fernández, and Mirta Yáñez.
Linda Coverdale has translated many modern French classics. In addition to several books by Annie Ernaux, she has translated works by Roland Barthes, Emmanuel Carrère, Patrick Chamoiseau, Maryse Condé, Marie Darrieussecq, Hervé Guibert, Sébastien Japrisot, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Philippe Labro, Yann Queffélec, Jorge Semprun, and Patrick Volodine. In 2001, the French government awarded her the title of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Barbara D. Riess, assistant professor of Spanish at Allegheny College, received her Ph.D. in Latin American Literature and Translation from Arizona State University in 1999. Co-translator of the underground classic Chicano novel Puppet (New Mexico Press, 2001), with articles published in journals and encyclopedias, her most recent project is a collection of stories by Cuban author María Elena Llana: Havana’s Ghosts: Those That Neither Left Nor Stayed Behind.
Donald Daviau is professor of Austrian and German Literature at the University of California, Riverside (emeritus), former editor of the scholarly journal Modern Austrian Literature (1974–2000), cofounder and editor of Ariadne Press (1985–1999), and now English editor of the electronic journal TRANS (1995– ). He has authored 21 books and 190 articles on numerous Austrian authors and themes. He was awarded the prestigious Austrian Ehrenkreuz für Kunst und Wissenschaft in 1979. He lives in Riverside, California, when not in Austria.
Lisa Davis's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, Sister & Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives together, Queer View Mirror 2, New York Sex, Early Embraces II. She has taught in the State and City University systems of New York, and frequently publishes translations from Spanish--most recently in the Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction.
Cristina de la Torre has translated three novels: Absent Love (Crónica del desamor) by Rosa Montero (Spain), Mirror Images (Joc de miralls/Por persona interpuesta) by Carme Riera (Spain), and A Single, Numberless Death (Una sola muerte numerosa) by Nora Strejilevich (Argentina) as well as numerous short stories. She lives in Atlanta and teaches Spanish at Emory University.
d.a. démers is a translator, literary critic, and associate editor of Caliban. She lives in Madrid.
C. Dickson has translated Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio’s books The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts (1992) and Wandering Star (2004), as well as works by Gisèle Pineau, Mohammed Dib, and Shams Nadir.
Lisa Dillman is a Lecturer in Spanish at Emory University in Atlanta. She has translated biography, art history, and pedagogy in addition to Spanish, Catalan, Cuban, and Argentinian fiction. She is the co-editor with Peter Bush of Spain: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. Her most recent translation is the novel Pot Pourri: Whistlings of a Vagabond, by Eugenio Cambaceres (Oxford University Press).
Cola Franzen lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and concentrates on translating the creative work of Alicia Borinsky, Saúl Yurkievich, and Juan Cameron. She has also translated works by Claudio Guillén, and Guillermo Núñez. She is a member and past secretary-treasurer of ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) and vice-president of Language Research, Inc., founded by I.A. Richards, with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
David Frye teaches about Latin America at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Indians into Mexicans: History and Identity in a Mexican Town and has translated several books into English. He recently received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to translate El Periquillo Sarniento (The Mangy Parrot), written in 1816 by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi.
Amaia Gabantxo (1973 – ) was born in the Basque Country, where she grew up speaking both Basque and Spanish. She moved to England at age 20, and began to write in English. She now lives in Norwich, teaching literature at the University of East Anglia and writing reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. She is currently working on a novel dealing with fragmentation of identity and memory.
Edith Grossman is a leading translator of Spanish language fiction and poetry. With over twenty published volumes, she has translated, among others, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis, and Ariel Dorfman.
John H. R. Polt is Professor Emeritus of Spanish Literature at the University of California, Berkeley and has translated several Spanish and Spanish American authors.
Margaret Jull Costa has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin American writers, among them Mário de Sá-Carneiro, José Régio, Bernardo Atxaga, Carmen Martín Gaite, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Juan José Saer, and Luis Fernando Verissimo. She has won numerous prizes for her translations, including the Weidenfeld Translation Prize for José Saramago’s All the Names. She is preparing new translations of all the novels of Eça de Queiroz for Dedalus Books.
Helen Lane has translated the work of Juan Goytisolo, Octavio Paz, Luisa Valenzuela, Juan José Saer, Ernesto Sábato, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and has received many awards—notably the NBA, the Gulbenkian, and PEN Club Translation Prizes. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Anna Livia (1955–2007) taught French and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a scholar, novelist, and translator, and also a dedicated feminist. Among her translations are Lucie Delarue Mardrus, The Angel and the Perverts, and A Perilous Advantagean, an anthology of writings by Natalie Clifford Barney. Her novel, Bruised Fruit (1999) was short-listed for a Lammy award. Two earlier books—Minimax (1991) and Incidents Involving Mirth (1990)—were short-listed for the same award.
Alfred MacAdam is the editor of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, a publication of the Americas Society. He teaches Latin American literature at Barnard College and Columbia University. He has translated Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and other Spanish American authors.
Carol Maier teaches Spanish and translation at Kent State University (USA), where she serves as graduate coordinator and is affiliated with the Institute for Applied Linguistics. Her translations include Rosa Chacel’s Memoirs of Leticia Valle, María Zambrano’s Delirium and Destiny, Octavio Armand’s Refractions, and (with Suzanne Jill Levine) Severo Sarduy’s Christ on the Rue Jacob. Her essay about the poetics of exile appears in Translation and Power, edited by Maria Tymozcko and Edwin Gentzler.
John McCarthy is a translator and interpreter based in London who also lectures on translation and interpreting at a number of universities. In addition to literary and academic projects he also works in legal and social aid for refugees, commercial translation, and conference interpreting.
Anne McLean studied history in London, Ontario, and literary translation in London, England. She has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs, and other writings by authors including Julio Cortázar, Orlando González Esteva, Ignacio Padilla, Luis Sepúlveda, and Paula Varsavsky. Her most recent translations are Living’s the Strange Thing by Carmen Martín Gaite and Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas.
David Petreman is currently a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Wright State University. He has published books and articles on Latin American literature and his poetry can be found in many U.S. and Canadian literary journals. He has translated the work of a number of Chilean writers and poets. His most recent book is The Faces of Rain (Los Rostros de la Lluvia), a bilingual edition of the poetry of Marino Muñoz Lagos.
Gregory Rabassa's brilliant translations have brought more than forty Spanish and Portuguese novels to the English-speaking world. García Márquez once said that he was "the best Latin American writer in the English language." He is currently a distinguished professor of Comparative Literature at the City University of New York.
William Rodarmor (1942– ) is a journalist, editor, and French literary translator. One of his many book translations, Tamata and the Alliance, by solo sailor Bernard Moitessier, won the 1996 Lewis Galantière Award from the American Translators Association. His most recent translations are Julien Parme, by Florian Zeller (2008), Diasporas, by Stéphane Dufoix (2008), and The Book of Time, by Guillaume Prévost (2007). He lives in Berkeley, California, and took over the editing of this book after Anna Livia’s untimely death.
John Rutherford is a fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford, where he teaches Spanish, Spanish-American, and Galician language and literature. He has also translated La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas (Clarín) and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, both for Penguin Classics. At Oxford he runs a weekly Galician Translation Workshop, the members of which helped with the translation from the Galician language of the story by Méndez Ferrín. For the translation of La Regenta he was decorated in 1984 by King Juan Carlos of Spain with the Medalla de Oro al Mérito en las Bellas Artes.
Katherine Silver (1957 - ) is a freelance translator, editor, teacher, and writer who has lived in Chile frequently and for long periods from 1979 to the present. She has translated the works of Antonio Skármeta (The Postman), Elena Poniatowska, José Emilio Pacheco, and Martín Adán. She has also translated Pedro Lemebel’s The Queen of the Corner for Grove/Atlantic Press.
Hardie St. Martin has translated work by Vincente Aleixandre, Roque Dalton, Enrique Lihn, Nicanor Parra, and Luisa Valenzuela, among others. He is the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship in 1965, and a P.E.N. International Translation Award and an ALTA award for excellence in editing and translation. He lives in Barcelona.
Rose Vekony translates scholarly and literary texts from French and Spanish. A certified member of the American Translators Association, she is an editor at the University of California Press.
Lawrence Venuti (1953 – ) is a translator of Italian literature as well as a translation theorist and historian. He has translated works by Barbara Alberti, Dino Buzzati, Milo De Angelis, and I.U. Tarchetti. Recent translations include Juan Rodolfo Wilcock’s The Temple of Iconoclasts and Antonia Pozzi’s Breath: Poems and Letters. He has investigated the practice of translation in such books as The Translator’s Invisibility (Routledge), and he reviews Italian fiction for the New York Times. He is currently professor of English at Temple University.
Natasha Wimmer is the literary editor of The American Scholar and a contributing editor at Publishers Weekly. Her translation of Mario Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
