Not Gone, Just Busy Translating Women

Not nearly enough writers are translators, but all translators are writers. (And novelists and poets and essayists and playwrights and memoirists.) Chicago’s literary map is of course dotted with many great and well-known writers—Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rebecca Makkai, to name just a few—but perhaps far lesser known is the literary influence of Chicago- and Midwest-based translators, many of whom are immigrants and heritage speakers bringing all the languages of the world into English.

Writers can be cagey, unfriendly, backstabby, prone to long bouts of solitude. Sometimes that’s for good reason—any idea shared before crucial incubation can suddenly be up for grabs. Not so with literary translators, who, freed from the burden of inventing rhyme, plot, or characters, relish collaboration and community. Their work—whether wrestling with a dense political novel or the delicate, volatile music of a poem—is a beautiful constraints-based exercise, a form of linguistic criticism, a snapshot of a culture’s language in one precise moment, something both urgent and lasting.

Founded in 2016 in Chicago, the Third Coast Translators Collective (TCTC) is a living, breathing organism of over thirty members working in languages as varied as Arabic, Korean, Bulgarian, Basque, BSMC, Chinese, French, Hebrew, Ukrainian, German, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Italian. In the last five years alone, TCTC members have won multiple NEA awards, published over two dozen books, held over twenty workshops, attended five American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conferences, launched dozens of books in local Chicago bookstores, and eaten countless bars of dark chocolate. To give back, in 2024 the collective founded a travel fellowship for emerging members to the annual ALTA conference.

Collectives like ours are not relics of the past but vital spaces where language, culture, and community meet—and where the work of carrying stories across borders continues, urgently and joyfully.

This Women in Translation Month, we share recent and forthcoming work from TCTC members. It is our way of showing that collectives like ours are not relics of the past but vital spaces where language, culture, and community meet—and where the work of carrying stories across borders continues, urgently and joyfully.

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Trans. Alex Niemi (from French)
The Endless Week, by Laura Vazquez
Dorothy, a publishing project; forthcoming September 2025

Winner of the 2023 Prix Goncourt for poetry, Vazquez’s first novel was unanimously lauded by French critics and earned her a special mention for the Prix Wepler. Its US publisher describes the book as “a debut novel unlike any other, a lyrical anti-epic about the beauty, violence, trauma, and absurdity of the internet age.” The novel recounts the story of Salim, a young poet whose life takes place primarily online, and his search for his long-lost mother, though, as the publisher states, his “real quest is through the landscape of language and suffering that saturates both the real world and the virtual.” Kirkus Reviews describes The Endless Week as “a rigorously unsettling reading experience, without plot, tension, or character development. But the details and countless vignettes deliver an immense range of emotion. . . . Grotesquely inventive and amusing, like a corner torn from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.” For her translation of The Endless Week, Alex received residencies from the Jan Michalski Foundation and Translation House Looren as well as support from France’s National Center for the Book. She joined the collective in 2024 and is on the membership committee.

Trans. Ali Kinsella & Dzvinia Orlowsky (from Ukrainian)
Lost in Living, by Halyna Kruk 
Lost Horse Press, 2024

This collection of poems, translated by TCTC member Ali Kinsella along with Dzvinia Orlowsky, was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and subsequently shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. It presents unpublished work from the immediate “pre-invasion” years when life in Ukraine was marked by turmoil but full-scale war was not yet normalized. Imagery and tone underscore poetic agency, at times juxtaposing figurative language with a calm, direct voice to bring the poems to life. Of the book, Valzhyna Mort said, “Halyna Kruk is a poet of lyrical spells and musical whispers. Her human-scale voice confronts the inhumane historical landscape out of which she speaks, insisting on . . . a bit of light in the dark.” Ali, who has been translating from Ukrainian for over a decade, is a relatively new member of TCTC, an organization she sought out because she was missing community in her professional life.

Trans. Chenxin Jiang (from Chinese)
for now I am sitting here growing transparent, by Yau Ching 
Zephyr Press, 2025

Called “a memorable and essential survey of one writer’s work” by Words Without Borders, Yau Ching’s poetry—simultaneously erudite and earthy—summons seemingly disparate elements such as growing up in a public housing estate and imagining chatting with a steak about ethics. Chenxin’s translation of Yau Ching’s work won the Words Without Borders–Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Contest in 2021, and poems from the collection were featured in Poem-a-Day and WLT. The US launch was hosted by TCTC at the Seminary Co-Op in Chicago and featured fellow TCTCer Yaerim Gen Kwon. Chenxin has been a proud member of TCTC ever since its founding.

Trans. Denise Kripper (from Spanish) 
When My Body Ceased to Be Your Home, by Emma Sepúlveda 
Literal Publishing + Hablemos, escritoras; forthcoming October 2025

When My Body Ceased to Be Your Home, by Emma Sepúlveda, delves into the true story of Colonia Dignidad, a Nazi religious cult that settled in Chile for decades with the complicity and support of the German and Chilean governments, and which is known for its human rights abuses during the Pinochet dictatorship. It tells the story of Ilse, a woman who managed to survive her horrific imprisonment and escape from the colony, where she endured years of forced labor, gender-based violence, and torture. Her story is a testimony to her power and resilience, and the book’s exploration of power, abuse, and control over vulnerable individuals (especially women and children) resonates deeply with current global struggles against exclusion and discrimination. The translation of this novel is a joint collaboration between Literal Publishing and Hablemos, escritoras and was made possible thanks to the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile. Denise is a founding member of TCTC, and she has long been involved in the collective’s outreach and community efforts, organizing events in the city of Chicago and helping build the collective’s online presence through its website and social media platforms.

Trans. Izidora Angel (from Bulgarian) 
She Who Remains, by Rene Karabash 
Sandorf Passage & Peirene Press; forthcoming January 2026

High in the mist-shrouded Accursed Mountains, in a remote village bound by the unforgiving laws of the Kanun, Bekija escapes an arranged marriage by renouncing her womanhood and taking an oath to live as a man, Matija. But this choice unleashes a chain of tragedy, shatters her family, and tears her from the secret love of her life. Years later, when a visiting journalist comes to hear the story of one of the last remaining sworn virgins, long-buried truths are revealed, including the haunting shadow of what actually was and what might have been. Izidora’s fourth full-length translation from Bulgarian won both the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, with the latter calling the novel “culturally profound and relevant, universally, at a historical moment when many are struggling to understand the transgender experience and gender fluidity.” Izidora is one of the co-founders of the collective, one half of its social media godmother duo, and she’s especially grateful to have workshopped an early draft of She Who Remains with the collective, which was crucial to its early success.

Trans. Kay Heikkinen (from Arabic) 
Granada: The Complete Trilogy, by Radwa Ashour 
American University in Cairo Press, 2024

Granada is a set of novels that opens with the conquest of Granada in 1492 by the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, sweeping away the last vestiges of Muslim rule on the Iberian Peninsula, which closes in 1609 with the final expulsion of the Moriscos (Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity before 1526) (see Gretchen McCullough’s WLT review, Feb. 2025). The major historical events of sixteenth-century Europe form the background of the story, but what we read is the tale of the bookseller Abu Jaafar and several generations of his family, as they struggle to find a path forward in the face of grinding cultural erasure and implacable hatred of the other, cloaked in religion. The story is told with humor and hope, against all odds, and it continues to speak to our divided world today. Kay, who translates Arabic fiction, is a founding member of TCTC and was previously the Ibn Rushd Lecturer in Arabic at the University of Chicago. She won the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for the novel Velvet, by Huzama Habayeb (2019). 

Trans. Kathleen Maris Paltrineri (from Norwegian)
and when the light comes it will be so fantastic, by Kristin Berget
Curbstone Books, 2025

Kristin Berget’s 2017 Brage Prize–nominated poetry collection is the first of her books to appear in English—an innovative exploration of the climate crises we are living with today and the complex emotions that ebb and flow along with it. Berget’s poetics point to landscapes used as sites of extraction, where exhausted phosphorus, starving clay layers, and forest machines are encountered. The poems in this collection traverse forests, deserts, and seas—their poetic matter separated by fields of caesuras, visual absences suggestive of Earth’s ongoing extinctions. As jurors of the Brage Prize commented, within these pages is a universe where humans can seldom be separated from one another or from the nature they live in and among. Kathleen’s translation is supported by a Stanley Award for International Research and by Norwegian Literature Abroad (NORLA). Kathleen is a poet-translator from Iowa and the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to Norway. She became a TCTC member in 2023 and was recently the winner of the collective’s second annual travel fellowship.

Trans. Neil Blackadder (from French & German)
Sanderling, by Anne Weber
Indigo Press; forthcoming fall 2025

Described as a “travel diary through time” and a “personal journey of exploration into the past,” Weber’s book delves into the complexities of family history and personal identity, exploring the life of the author’s great-grandfather, Florens Christian Rang. Through research and travel, it uncovers the contradictions and crises within a family's past, prompting broader questions about morality and ethics. This is Neil’s first full-length prose translation, which he translated both from German and French, and which won him a 2022 NEA fellowship. Aside from prose, Neil translates drama, and his translations have been staged in London, New York, and other cities. He discovered TCTC in 2019 through a lively, well-attended public workshop the collective organized. Since his move to New York in 2022, TCTC is how Neil retains his connection to Chicago.

Trans. Slava Faybysh (from Spanish)
Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case, by Elsa Drucaroff
Corylus Books, 2024

Set during the dictatorship years, when thirty thousand dissidents were disappeared by the Argentine junta, Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case, Slava’s first full-length translation, expands on known factual events and Walsh’s real writings to create a fast-paced thriller. As reviewer Lizzy Siddal noted, “Walsh’s Letter to My Friends, which recounted the death of his daughter, was short and concise, restricted to facts, but it wasn’t the full story of a father’s passion and pain. Circumstances wouldn’t permit Walsh to write that. So Elsa Drucaroff has written it for him.” Rodolfo Walsh is a canonical author of detective novels himself, and he is credited with inventing the true-crime genre with his book Operation Massacre. What people did not know at the time was that he and his daughter were also clandestine revolutionaries. As another reviewer, Pablo Baler, noted, “After turning the last page of this novel, one has the lingering feeling that resistance could suddenly be imbued with poetry, and that literature can turn out to be political in the broadest metaphysical sense.” Slava was born in Ukraine and moved to the Chicago area as a child. He joined TCTC in 2019, is actively involved in its administration, and in 2024 was one of two winners of the collective’s inaugural travel fellowship to ALTA.

Trans. Susanna Lang (from French)
Unfasten the Silk of Your Silence, by Souad Labbize
Éditions des Lisières, 2025

This trilingual edition includes poems by the Algerian-French writer Souad Labbize in Arabic, French, and English. Originally written in French, with an English translation by Susanna Lang and an Arabic translation by Rahil Bali, the collection as a whole is a love song to the beloved, a singer whose music floats through the poet’s language. It is a message in a bottle:

Teach me
how to unfasten
slowly  
leaving no wrinkles
the silk of your silence

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