Jennifer Croft | |
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Born | 1981or1982(age 42–43) [1] |
Alma mater | University of Tulsa (BA) University of Iowa (MFA) Northwestern University (PhD) |
Occupations |
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Jennifer Croft is an American author, critic and translator who translates works from Polish, Ukrainian and Argentine Spanish. With the author Olga Tokarczuk, she was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights . [2] In 2020, she was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her autofictional memoir Homesick.
Croft grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she entered the University of Tulsa at age 15. [3] After completing her BA at the University of Tulsa in 2001, [4] she learned Polish at the University of Iowa, where she did her MFA in literary translation. She lived in Warsaw, Poland for two years on a Fulbright scholarship. As she said in one of her interviews, "Polish has always been more of an academic and professional connection for me, but I try to go back to Kraków or Warsaw at least once a year to maintain that connection". [5] It was during her time in Warsaw that she met author Olga Tokarczuk with whom she worked on the novel Flights . [6]
She learned her Spanish in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and says of her work translating Argentine Spanish,
I only translate works from Spanish that were written by Argentine authors—there’s such great diversity among the different Spanishes, and I’ve always felt it’s really important to be fully familiar with all the little components of speech, the quotidian rhythms writers employ and depart from. It's important for me to be able to hear the tone of a sentence, picture the facial expression and gestures that would accompany it, in order to find a fitting rendition in English. [5]
Croft received a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University. [7]
She is a founding editor of The Buenos Aires Review and has published her own work and numerous translations in The New Yorker , The New York Times , The New York Review of Books , The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books , VICE, n+1 , Electric Literature, Lit Hub, BOMB, Guernica, The New Republic , The Guardian , The Chicago Tribune , Granta , and elsewhere.
Croft translated Romina Paula's August (The Feminist Press, 2017), Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery (Charco Press, 2021), Pedro Mairal's The Woman from Uruguay (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), Tina Oziewicz's What Feelings Do When No One's Looking (Elsewhere Editions, 2022), Sylvia Molloy's Dislocations (Charco Press, 2022), and Sebastián Martínez Daniell's Two Sherpas (Charco Press, 2023). Her translation of Tokarczuk's Flights from Polish was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in May 2017. [8] Croft has also translated Tokarczuk's novel Księgi Jakubowe ( The Books of Jacob ), which won the Nike Award in 2015. [2] [9]
Croft has written about postcards, translation and exile, [10] contemporary American fiction, [11] and Tempelhof Airport. [12] From 2021 to 2022 she was a Visiting assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas. As of 2023, she is a Presidential Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa.
With her essay in The Guardian , "Why translators should be named on book covers," [13] Croft launched the #TranslatorsOnTheCover campaign in cooperation with the Society of Authors and the author Mark Haddon. [14] The campaign has raised awareness of the collaborative nature of translated literature by foregrounding the identity of the translator, who, Croft argues, is the person who writes every word of the translated work.
Her debut novel The Extinction of Irena Rey was published in 2024. [15] [16] [17] Publishers Weekly wrote that Croft, "serves up a wickedly funny mystery involving an internationally famous author and her translators". [18] Croft began writing the novel, which was inspired by a trip to the Bialowieza Forest on the border of Poland and Belarus, in 2017. [19]
Croft is the recipient of Guggenheim, Cullman, Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, Fondation Jan Michalski, Yaddo, and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation and a Tin House Workshop Scholarship for Homesick.
With the author Olga Tokarczuk, Croft won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
On being asked what drew her to the writer's work, Jennifer Croft has said,
I stumbled upon Olga Tokarczuk’s first short-story collection, Playing Many Drums, in 2003 as I prepared for a Fulbright at the University of Warsaw, where I would continue to study literary translation. Right away I loved her soothing, nuanced style, but I think the thing that appealed to me most was her psychological acuity, her ability to distill the essence of a person—I say "person" since her characters are so alive it’s hard for me to call them characters—and set in motion relationships that might charm and shock us at the same time, all while feeling both familiar and fresh.
On being asked specifically about the novel Flights, Croft said,
Tokarczuk calls Flights a "constellation" novel, which partly means she brings lots of different ideas and stories and voices into relationship with one another via the lines the reader draws between them. This made the translation process both challenging and particularly delightful, since I was able to tap into a fresh subject every time I sat down to my computer. One minute I was worrying about the woman who flies back to Poland from New Zealand to kill a dying childhood friend; the next I was amused by the foibles of the Internet; the next I was rethinking my own approach to travel, or to my body. I could go on and on. I loved translating this book. [20]
In March 2022, Croft's translation of Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob was longlisted for the 2022 Man Booker International Prize. [21] subsequently being shortlisted in April. [22]
Croft received the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick, which was originally written as a novel in Spanish in 2014 and was published in Argentina under its original title, Serpientes y escaleras. According to Croft, "Neither the Spanish nor the English is a translation." [23] In 2022, she was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, which was published by Bloomsbury on March 5, 2024. [24] Her short story "Anaheim," published by The Kenyon Review, was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize. [25]
Croft was awarded a 2023 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in literature.
The International Booker Prize is an international literary award hosted in the United Kingdom. The introduction of the International Prize to complement the Man Booker Prize, as the Booker Prize was then known, was announced in June 2004. Sponsored by the Man Group, from 2005 until 2015 the award was given every two years to a living author of any nationality for a body of work published in English or generally available in English translation. It rewarded one author's "continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage", and was a recognition of the writer's body of work rather than any one title.
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. She was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Her works include Primeval and Other Times, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and The Books of Jacob.
Tina Kover is a literary translator. She studied French at the University of Denver and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and attended the Next Level Language Institute in Prague, Czech Republic. She holds a Master's Degree in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Durham University.
Georgi Gospodinov Georgiev is a Bulgarian writer, poet and playwright. His novel Time Shelter received the 2023 International Booker Prize, shared with translator Angela Rodel, as well as the Strega European Prize. His novel The Physics of Sorrow received the Jan Michalski Prize and the Angelus Award. His works have been translated into 25 languages.
Olga Sofia Ravn is a Danish poet and novelist. Her works have received international critical acclaim. She is also a translator and has worked as a literary critic for Politiken and several other Danish publications.
The Found in Translation Award is an annual award for the best translation of Polish literature into English. The award is given to the translator(s) who also receive a cash prize of PLN 16,000.
Unnamed Press is an independent publisher based in Los Angeles, California. Unnamed Press publishes literary fiction and non-fiction, with an emphasis on debuts by women, underrepresented voices and people of color, as well as internationally focused speculative and fantasy. Its art director, Jaya Nicely, is an LA-based illustrator and designer.
Flights is a 2007 fragmentary novel by the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. The book was translated into English by Jennifer Croft. The original Polish title refers to runaways, a sect of Old Believers, who believe that being in constant motion is a trick to avoid evil.
Iona Macintyre is a scholar and translator, specializing in Latin American culture and literature. She studied at the University of Glasgow, and did her PhD at the University of Nottingham. She now teaches at the University of Edinburgh.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a 2009 mystery novel by Olga Tokarczuk. Originally published in Polish by Wydawnictwo Literackie, it was later translated to English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and published in 2018 by the British independent publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. The book received a wider release in 2019 when it was published in the United States by Riverhead Books on 13 August 2019. A portion of the English translation was originally published in literary magazine Granta in 2017.
Primeval and Other Times is a fragmentary novel by Olga Tokarczuk, published by Wydawnictwo W.A.B. in 1996.
Fitzcarraldo Editions is an independent British book publisher based in Deptford, London, specialising in literary fiction and long-form essays in both translation and English-language originals. It focuses on ambitious, imaginative, and innovative writing by little-known and neglected authors. Fitzcarraldo Editions currently publishes twenty-two titles a year. Four of Fitzcarraldo's authors have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature: Svetlana Alexievich (2015), Olga Tokarczuk (2018), Annie Ernaux (2022) and Jon Fosse (2023).
House of Day, House of Night is a novel by Olga Tokarczuk, published by Wydawnictwo Ruta in 1998.
The Books of Jacob is an epic historical novel by Olga Tokarczuk, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in October 2014. It is Tokarczuk's ninth novel and is the product of extensive historical research, taking her seven years to write.
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life." The prize was announced the following year by the Swedish Academy on 10 October 2019. Tokarczuk is the fifth Nobel laureate in Literature from Poland writing in Polish, after the poet Wisława Szymborska in 1996, and Czesław Miłosz in 1980.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a British translator of Polish literature based in London. She is best known as the long-time translator of Olga Tokarczuk's works in English, including Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019. The former co-chair of the Translators Association in the United Kingdom from 2015 to 2017, she is also a mentor for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme in the National Centre for Writing and has mentored several early-career translators from Polish into English.
Charco Press is an independent publisher based in Edinburgh that specialises in translating contemporary Latin American fiction into English. It was launched in 2016 by Carolina Orloff and Samuel McDowell and has since enjoyed considerable success. Its professed aim is to introduce groundbreaking works of contemporary Latin American literature through carefully crafted translations to an audience that may be unfamiliar with its themes or narrative styles. In 2019, the house began distribution in Canada and the US. In 2021, it launched a collection of original works in Spanish, and in 2022, one of original works in English.
E.E. is a 1995 psychological novel by the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. Set in Wrocław at the turn of the 20th century, it tells the story of a teenaged Erna Eltzer, who suddenly gains paranormal skills and is used as a medium. The novel draws from Carl Jung's doctoral dissertation On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a fiction writer and translator of Brazilian literature. Her translation of The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Her translation of The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório won an English PEN Translates Award, and her translation of Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize.
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story is a 2022 historical novel by Olga Tokarczuk. Originally published in Polish by Wydawnictwo Literackie, it was later translated to English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and published in 2024 by Riverhead Books (US) and Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK). It was Tokarczuk's first new novel in eight years, and her first since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.