Teresa D. Lewis is an American translator, writer, and essayist. She is best known for her translation of French author Christine Angot's novel, Incest which was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award and her translation of Austrian poet and novelist Maja Haderlap's novel Angel of Oblivion, which was awarded the 2017 PEN Translation Prize, the Austrian Cultural Forum NY Translation Prize, and was nominated for the BTBA. She has also translated works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, and Philippe Jaccottet. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and received the Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, New College, in 1986. Website: www.tesslewis.org
Lewis is an essayist and translator. Her essays, primarily about European literature, have been published in The New Criterion , The Hudson Review , World Literature Today , The American Scholar , and Bookforum. [1] She is an advisory editor for The Hudson Review, [2] and is also a board member for the National Books Critics Circle. [1] From 2014 to 2015, Lewis was the curator for the Festival Neue Literature, an American literary festival based in New York, which focuses on German-language literature from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, in English, and consists of literary events, book readings, and panels. [1]
Lewis translates primarily from French and German into English, [3] and has translated works by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Alois Hotschnig, Melinda Nadj Abonji, Julya Rabinowich, Lukas Bärfuss, Philippe Jaccottet, Jean-Luc Benoziglio, Pascal Bruckner, Maja Haderlap, Peter Handke, Christine Angot, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, and Anselm Kiefer. [4] In 2017, she published an English translation of Christine Angot's novel, Incest. Her translation was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award. [5] In a review in the New Yorker, critic H. C. Wilentz praised Lewis's translation, noting the challenges raised by Angot's "antagonism towards conventional syntax," which made Lewis's translation "a feat of perspicuity". [6] In Asymptote Journal, Tsipi Keller praised Lewis's translation as well, stating that "it feels as though Angot, so very French, is speaking to us directly in English." [7] In 2015 she received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to support her translation of Swiss writer Ludwig Hohl’s Notizen, a book consisting of Hohl's notes, journal entries, and reflections. [1] In 2022, she has received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts to translate In the Forest of the Metropoles by Karl-Markus Gauß. [8]
Hans Magnus Enzensberger was a German author, poet, translator, and editor. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Andreas Thalmayr, Elisabeth Ambras, Linda Quilt and Giorgio Pellizzi. Enzensberger was regarded as one of the literary founding figures of the Federal Republic of Germany and wrote more than 70 books, with works translated into 40 languages. He was one of the leading authors in Group 47, and influenced the 1968 West German student movement. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize and the Pour le Mérite, among many others.
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She is one of the most decorated authors to write in German and was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power". She is considered to be among the most important living playwrights of the German language.
Maryse Condé was a French novelist, critic, and playwright from the French Overseas department and region of Guadeloupe. She was also an academic, whose teaching career took her to West Africa and North America, as well as the Caribbean and Europe. As a writer, Condé is best known for her novel Ségou (1984–1985).
Edmund Leroy "Mike" Keeley was an American novelist, translator, and essayist, a poet, and Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University. He was a noted expert on the Greek poets C. P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, and Yannis Ritsos, and on post-Second World War Greek history.
Jennifer Clement is an American-Mexican author. Clement has written several novels, including Gun Love (2018) and Prayers for the Stolen (2014), and published several collections of poetry and the memoirs 'Widow Basquiat' (2001)and 'The Promised Party'(2024). She is the first and only woman president of PEN International, elected in 2015.
Jennifer Grotz is an American poet and translator who teaches English, creative writing, and literary translation at the University of Rochester, where she is Professor of English. In 2017 she was named the seventh director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Ludwig Hohl was a Swiss writer writing in the German language. Outside of literary mainstream, he spent most of his life in extreme poverty. He is largely unknown to a wider public but has been praised by several well-known authors for his writing and his radical thinking about life and literature.
Howard Goldblatt is a literary translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese fiction, including The Taste of Apples by Huang Chunming and The Execution of Mayor Yin by Chen Ruoxi. Goldblatt also translated works of Chinese novelist and 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mo Yan, including six of Mo Yan's novels and collections of stories. He was a Research Professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame from 2002 to 2011.
Eduardo Halfon is a Guatemalan writer.
An Austrian Cultural Forum is an agency of the Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs, responsible for cultural and scientific dialogue with artists and scientists of each host country. A cultural forum focuses on the specific needs of local users and partners, and works independently on different contents. The international network currently consists of 30 cultural forums.
Alois Hotschnig is an Austrian writer, whose stories have been described as having "the weird, creepy, and ambiguous quality of disturbing dreams". He first studied medicine, then German and English in Innsbruck. He was winner of the Erich Fried Prize in 2008, the Anton Wildgans Prize in 2009, and shortlisted for the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in 2010. He lives as a freelance author in Innsbruck.
Maja Haderlap is a bilingual Slovenian-German Austrian writer, best known for her multiple-award-winning novel, Angel of Oblivion, about the Slovene ethnic minority's transgenerational trauma of being treated as 'homeland traitors' by the German-speaking Austrian neighbors, because they were the only ever-existing military resistance against National Socialism in Austria.
Peter Filkins is an American poet and literary translator. Filkins graduated from Williams College with a Bachelor of Arts and from Columbia University with a Master of Fine Arts degree. His poetry collections include the forthcoming Water / Music, as well as The View We’re Granted, co-winner of the 2013 Sheila Motton Best Book Award from the New England Poetry Club, and Augustine’s Vision, winner of the 2009 New American Press Chapbook Award. His poems, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including The New Republic, Partisan Review, The New Criterion, Poetry, The Yale Review, the New York Times Book Review, and the Los Angeles Times. He is a recipient of a 2005 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, a 2015-2016 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a 2014 Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Austria. In 2012 he was writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House, and he has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.
Angela Piskernik was an Austro-Yugoslav botanist and conservationist.
The Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation is a literary translation award given by the Society of Authors in London. Translations from the German original into English are considered for the prize. The value of the prize is £3,000, while the runner-up now receives £1,000. The prize is named for August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, who translated Shakespeare to German in the 19th century.
Patrick Roth is a German writer. He moved to the USA in his early twenties and lived there for many years. The author of more than a dozen books, he has won a number of literary prizes including the Rauris Literature Prize, the Hugo-Ball-Preis and the Literaturpreis der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. His book Starlite Terrace was translated into English by Krishna Winston.
Lutz Seiler is a German poet and novelist. Considered one of the most important German poets living today, he is the author of numerous books of poetry, prose, and essays, and gained national attention for his debut novel Kruso. In 2023 he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize, the most prestigious award for German literature. He has served as the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Museum since 1997.
Karen Leeder is a British writer, translator and scholar of German culture. She is professor of Modern German Literature in the University of Oxford. In 2021 she was elected as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature, a position she took up at The Queen's College, Oxford in 2022.
Melinda Nadj Abonji is a Hungarian-Swiss writer, musician, and performance artist. Melinda Nadj Abonji was born in the Hungarian part of Vojvodina, in present-day Serbia. She came to Switzerland at the age of 5 to join her refugee parents.
Incest is a 1999 autofiction novel by French author Christine Angot. It was translated into English by Tess Lewis in 2017. The story follows an anxious, depressed woman named Christine as she works through emotional turmoil following the end of her relationship with her lover and first lesbian partner Marie-Christine. Christine conveys her thoughts in a very disconnected manner as she discusses with readers the complicated relationships with her ex-lover, her ex-husband, her young daughter, and her father, who instigated an incestuous relationship with Christine when she was a teenager.