Translators

Photo by Paul Brannan

Katie King (doolittleproject.wordpress.com) is an award-winning journalist and literary translator currently working on a PhD in Hispanic studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

PHOTO: Zhai Yongming

Lucas Klein is a father, writer, and translator as well as assistant professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong.

Neal Koga translates short stories and poetry from German, Persian, and Turkish, and works freelance as a manuscript editor. His translation of Galsan Tschinag’s “The Swan Song of a Departing People” appears in the March 2015 print edition of WLT. He also composes and publishes songs under the name Jamal.

Hilah Kohen is a University of Pennsylvania doctoral student currently in residence at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Her collaborations in Juhuri (Kavkazi Jewish) language advocacy include curatorial work for the Jewish Language Project and an article foregrounding Indigenous languages of the Russian Federation for Russian Language Journal. With Josephine von Zitzewitz, Kohen co-edited the “Russophonia” issue of Words Without Borders.

Ani Kokobobo is associate professor and chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. Her writings have appeared with the Washington Post, LARB, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jozefina Komporaly is editor and co-translator of the collections How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients and Other Plays, András Visky’s Barrack Dramaturgy, and Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion, and the author of numerous publications on translation, adaptation, and theater. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, Columbia Journal, Los Angeles Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and others. Recently published volumes include Mr K Released, by Matéi Visniec (finalist for the 2021 EBRD Literature Prize), and Story of a Stammer, by Gábor Vida. Her forthcoming translation of Home, by Andrea Tompa, which was excerpted in the Summer 2021 issue of WLT, was the recipient of a PEN Translates Grant.

Nina Kossman is a Moscow-born artist, bilingual poet, translator of Russian poetry, sculptor, and playwright. Among her published works are three books of poems in Russian and in English, two collections of short stories, an anthology she edited for Oxford University Press, two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems, a novel, and several plays. Her Russian poems and short stories have been published in major Russian literary magazines in and outside of Russia. A recipient of many awards, she lives in New York. She edits East-West Literary Forum, a bilingual journal (in English and Russian).

Photo by Diana Tyszko

Christina E. Kramer is professor emerita at the University of Toronto. She is the author of numerous books on Macedonian language and the Balkans and a translator of Macedonian literature: Freud’s Sister, by Goce Smilevski; My Father’s Books, The Time of the Goats, and The Path of the Eels, by Luan Starova; and A Spare Life, by Lidija Dimkovksa. 

Denise Kripper is a literary translator from Buenos Aires. She holds a PhD in literature and cultural studies from Georgetown University and is now an assistant professor of Latin American literature and translation at Lake Forest College.

Alison Krögel is an associate professor of Quechua and Andean Studies at the University of Denver and the editor of the digital Quechua poetry collective, Musuq Illa. Her latest book of literary criticism—Musuq Illa: Poética del harawi en runasimi (2000–2020)—was published in 2021 and focuses on contemporary Quechua poetry from Ecuador, Perú, and Bolivia.

Chamini Kulathunga is a Sri Lankan translator. She is a graduate of the Iowa Translation Workshop. She was a visiting fellow at Cornell University’s South Asia Program in the summer of 2019 and was the former blog editor and a staff editor in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Review, Exchanges, DoubleSpeak, Bengaluru Review, and elsewhere.

Ilana Kurshan is the author of If All the Seas Were Ink, published in 2017 by St. Martin’s Press.

Photo by Danielle Aquiline

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. She is the author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (2015), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize, and the poetry collection Wolf Lamb Bomb (April 2021). She is The Forward’s language columnist and an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago. 

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Anna Kushner’s translation of Marcial Gala’s The Black Cathedral was released in 2020 to rave reviews in the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and other major publications. It is newly out in paperback. Her translation of Leonardo Padura’s The Transparency of Time is forthcoming from FSG this summer. As a writer, Kushner has published poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction in Crab Orchard Review, Cuba Counterpoints, Wild River Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.

Sunja Kim Kwock’s work focuses on the conjunction of Buddhism and Christianity, particularly liberation theology.

Sinéad Quirke Køngerskov is an award-winning translator. Her translations include The Oseberg Ship, by Vibeke Bischoff; Truth’s Labyrinth, by Jørgen Steines; and A New Beginning, by Anna Eckhoff. Sinéad is secretary of the Association of Danish to English Literary Translators.

Matthew Landrum holds an MFA from Bennington College. His translations of Jóanes Nielsen have appeared in Image Journal, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Jamie Lauer completed a certificate in literary translation at Indiana University, Bloomington, along with a master’s in comparative literature. Under the guidance of Professor Bill Johnston, she has translated different authors from across Latin America, but Chilean literature and Chilean Spanish hold a special place in her heart because of the four months she lived in Chile.

Photo by David Gasser

Aurora Lauzardo Ugarte is a tenured professor and chair of the Graduate Program in Translation at the University of Puerto Rico. Her work includes literary, theater, scholarly, and audiovisual translations into both Spanish and English.

Su Layug is a professional Tagalog translator and interpreter. She has also won awards for her writing, in the Philippines and in the US, including the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and the Ray Bradbury Creative Contest.

Charles LeBel is the translator of five essays published in a recent Routledge collection, and his own writing has appeared in the journals alter/nativas and Border Lines.

Jane Lee (b. 1974, Seoul) graduated from Queens College, City University of New York, with a bachelor’s degree in English. She has been working as a professional translator for over ten years. Passion for Korean literature and love of writing drove her to study literary translation at the Korea Language Translation Institute in 2010 and 2011. Now residing back in South Korea, she is currently studying Korean writers and their works and writing her own short stories.

Dade Lemanski lives in western Massachusetts. She teaches teenagers, hikes, and works as the copyeditor of In geveb, a new digital journal of Yiddish studies.

Rika Lesser, twice the recipient of translation prizes from the Swedish Academy, is the author of four books of poems and seven books of poetry in translation. She resides in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Henry Wei Leung is the author of Goddess of Democracy (2017). He is studying at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

An eminent translator of Latin American literature and Guggenheim Fellow, Suzanne Jill Levine’s recent works include her five-volume edition of Jorge Luis Borges’s poetry and nonfictions for Penguin paperback classics, the anthology Untranslatability Goes Global (Routledge), and her translation of Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (Seven Stories).

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a poet, translator, and assistant professor. She serves as the director of Kashkul (see WLT, July 2018) and the Slemani UNESCO City of Literature.

Photo ©Nick Levitin

Alexis Levitin’s forty books of translation include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words. He has received two NEA translation grants.

Dong Li was born and raised in P.R. China. He is German Chancellor Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2015–2016) as well as Literature Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015–2017). He was Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Poet-in-Residence (2013–2014). His honors include fellowships from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and elsewhere. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, manuskripte (Austria, in German translation), and others.

Ouyang Lifeng (b. 1966) is a professor and translator at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. He began publishing literary works in translation in 2015. His most important works include Youxian Shenghuo Xuyu / Essays on Easy Life (2015) and Xu Kun Zhong Duan Pian Xiaoshuo Ji / The Selected Works of Xu Kun (2019).