Writers & Translators
Translators and authors published by Two Lines Press and Calico.
Mohamad Nassereddine
Mohamad Nassereddine is a Lebanese poet born in 1977 in South Lebanon. He is the author of seven poetry collections, the most recent of which is Aqfās̩ tabḥath ‘an ‘as̩āfīr [Cages in search of birds] (2019). He is also a translator and a cultural journalist who regularly publishes work in the cultural appendix of the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.
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Elvira Navarro
Elvira Navarro (Huelva, Spain, 1978) has published both novels and short stories. Her novel A Working Woman, which addresses the impact of the economic crisis on the contemporary female experience, has established her as a leading voice in Spanish literature. She has been the recipient of numerous significant accolades in Spain, including the Jaén Novel Prize and the Andalusian Critics’ Prize. Additionally, Granta magazine has identified her as one of the twenty-two most distinguished Spanish writers under the age of thirty-five. Her collection of short stories, Rabbit Island, has been nominated for the 2021 National Book Award for Foreign Literature. Her most recent novel, The Voices of Adriana, has been awarded the 2023 Cálamo Special Prize. (Photo Credit: Rubén Bastida)
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Marie NDiaye
was born in 1967 in Pithiviers, France. She is the author of around twenty novels, plays, collections of stories, and nonfiction books, which have been translated into numerous languages. She’s received the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, and her plays are in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française.
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Raimundo Neto
Raimundo Neto is a young author already widely lauded for his rhythmic and at times claustrophobic prose. His work interrogates the struggles and joys of femininity across genders, and how it is constrained or cultivated by family, partners, and passersby. His debut short story collection, Todo esse amor que inventamos para nós, takes inspiration in part from his own experiences growing up femme in Brazil’s largely rural and working-class Northeast region.
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Denise Newman
Denise Newman is an award-winning poet and translator. Her fourth poetry collection Future People was published by Apogee Press in 2016. Newman has translated two novels by Inger Christensen—The Painted Room and Azorno. Her most recent translation, Baboon, by the Danish writer Naja Marie Aidt (Two Lines Press), won the 2015 PEN Translation Award and an NEA Fellowship. Her own writing has appeared widely, including in Denver Quarterly, Volt, Fence, New American Writing, and ZYZZYVA. She teaches at the California College of the Arts.
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João Gilberto Noll
João Gilberto Noll (1946–2017) is the author of nearly twenty books. His work appeared in Brazil’s leading periodicals, and he was a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation, King’s College London, and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. A five-time recipient of the Prêmio Jabuti, and the recipient of more than ten awards in all, he died in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the age of seventy.
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Lara Norgaard
Lara Norgaard is an essayist and literary translator. She has published nonfiction and literary criticism in Public Books, the Jakarta Post, Peixe-elétrico, and the Transpacific Literary Project, and translations from the Spanish, Portuguese, and Indonesian in Asymptote. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Harvard University, where she focuses on post-dictatorship Latin American and Southeast Asian literatures.
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Sabrina Nouri-Moosa
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Hodna Nuernberg
Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg holds an MA in francophone world studies and an MFA in literary translation, both from the University of Iowa. Her translations from the French and the Arabic have appeared in Anomaly, Asymptote, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Poet Lore, Two Lines, and elsewhere. Nuernberg lives in Morocco, where she serves as an editor-at-large for Asymptote and works as a translator for film and TV. Her co-translation of Raphaël Confiant’s Madam St. Clair, Queen of Harlem was published by Diálogos in January 2020.
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Masatsugu Ono
Masatsugu Ono is the author of numerous novels, including Mizu ni umoreru haka (The Water-Covered Grave), which won the Asahi Award for New Writers, and Nigiyakana wan ni seowareta fune (Boat on a Choppy Bay), which won the Mishima Prize. A prolific translator from the French—including works by Èdouard Glissant and Marie NDiaye—Ono received the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s highest literary honor, in 2015. He lives in Tokyo.
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Benjamin Paloff
Benjamin Paloff is the author of The Politics, a collection of poems; his next, And His Orchestra, will be released by Carnegie Mellon University Press in early 2015. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Stanford Humanities Center, he has translated several books from Polish, most recently Marek Bieńczyk’s Transparency and Andrzej Sosnowski’s Lodgings: Selected Poems. He teaches at the University of Michigan.
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Zoë Perry
Zoë Perry has translated the work of several contemporary Brazilian authors, including Juliana Leite, Veronica Stigger, Clara Drummond, Carol Bensimon and Ana Paula Maia. Her translations have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. Born and raised in southeastern Kentucky, she is currently based in Miami.
Upcoming Events
Exemplary Humans Book Tour
San Francisco, CA | Washington, DC | Brooklyn, NY
Juliana Leite, on tour from Brazil, is joined by translator Zoë Perry to celebrate the release of Exemplary Humans, a novel about one woman’s past and all of our futures.
Juliana Leite celebrates her English-language debut with translator Zoë Perry
Juliana Leite, on tour from Brazil, is joined by translator Zoë Perry to celebrate the release of Exemplary Humans, a novel about one woman’s past and all of our futures.
Tour Schedule
Tuesday, April 21 | 7:00 pm PDT
San Francisco: Exemplary Humans Launch Party with Juliana Leite, Zoë Perry, and Yalitza Ferreras
The Ruby, RSVP for address, San Francisco, CA
Thursday, April 23 | 7:00 pm EDT
Washington, DC: Juliana Leite and Zoë Perry on Exemplary Humans with Alex Brostoff
Lost City Books, 2467 18th St. NW, Washington, DC
Friday, April 24 | 7:00 pm EDT
Brooklyn: Juliana Leite on Exemplary Humans with Catherine Lacey
Community Bookstore, 143 7th Ave., Brooklyn, NY
About Exemplary Humans
Ever since the unnamed threat took over, 100-year-old Natalia has been stuck inside her Rio de Janeiro apartment, alone. Well, not entirely alone—her loved ones may be gone but they never really left her, plus she’s pretty sure there’s a spy watching her every move through the window.
As she waits for the daily call from her daughter who lives halfway across the world, the old woman revisits scenes from her life. There’s her husband Vicente, who obsessively erased maps of Brazil; her best friend Sarah, the cookie seller; Jorge, who gave tarot readings for both humans and birds; and the comrades who joined her in resisting Brazil’s dictatorship, at least until they were forced into hiding. Exemplary Humans is an ambitious novel about the quirks of memory and the delights and horror of aging.
Juliana Leite is a Brazilian writer based in São Paulo. Her work has been published in Italy, France, Portugal, in the UK and US, appearing in The Paris Review, the French newspaper Libération and many Brazilian magazines. She’s been awarded the O. Henry Prize for the story “My good friend”, the first Brazilian writer to ever achieve the distinction; the story was optioned for film. Her previous works have been shortlisted for and awarded many prizes in Brazil including the Critics’ Choice for best novel with her debut book, also optioned for film. Juliana has been a fellow writer at Art Omi, Ucross Foundation, and Hawthornden Foundation.
Zoë Perry has translated the work of several contemporary Brazilian authors, including Juliana Leite, Veronica Stigger, Clara Drummond, Carol Bensimon and Ana Paula Maia. Her translations have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. Born and raised in southeastern Kentucky, she is currently based in Miami.
Catherine Lacey is the author of six books, most recently Biography of X and The Möbius Book. She lives in Mexico City.
Alex Brostoff is a writer, translator, and educator. Their first book, a decolonial reframing of autotheory in the Américas, is under advance contract with Columbia University Press. They are co-editor of the collection Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025) and have guest edited special journal issues on autotheory (2021) and trans literatures (2025). They’ve also co-translated a range of literary nonfiction and critical theory from Spanish and Portuguese, including Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak’s Ancestral Future (Polity, 2024) and Brazilian activist Antônio Bispo dos Santos’s The Earth Gives, The Earth Wants (Polity, 2026). They are Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University.
Yalitza Ferreras is a Dominican American writer and recent Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University; fellowships and awards from Yaddo, Ucross, Djerassi, Hawthornden Foundation, Tin House, and Voices of Our Nation. Her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Kenyon Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Aster(ix), The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
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Duanwad Pimwana
Duanwad Pimwana is a major voice in contemporary Thai literature. She won Southeast Asia’s most prestigious literary prize—the S.E.A. Write Award——in 2003 for her novel Bright, and she is also the recipient of awards from PEN International Thailand and others. Acclaimed for her subtle fusing magic realism with Thai urban culture, she has written nine books, and her work has appeared in Words Without Borders and Asymptote.
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Mui Poopoksakul
Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer turned translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. She is the translator of Prabda Yoon’s The Sad Part Was and Moving Parts, both from Tilted Axis Press. She is translating a novel and a story collection by Duanwad Pimwana, both forthcoming in 2019 from Two Lines Press and Feminist Press, respectively. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the U.S., she now lives in Berlin, Germany.
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Richard Prins
Richard Prins is a New Yorker who has lived, worked, studied, and recorded music in Dar es Salaam. His poems and essays have appeared in publications such as Gulf Coast, jubilat and Plougshares and received “Notable” mentions in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. His translations from Swahili have received a 2023 Pen/Heim Translation Fund grant.
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Michelle Quay
Michelle Quay is a scholar, translator, and research fellow at the University of Birmingham where she works with the GlobalLIT project on Persian literary theory. She has taught Persian at Columbia University, University of Cambridge, and UCLA. A Gates Cambridge alumna, she holds her doctorate in Persian literature from Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. Her literary translations have appeared in Asymptote Journal, World Literature Today, and Exchanges, among others.
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Bjørn Rasmussen
Bjørn Rasmussen was born in 1983 and graduated from the Danish Playwright School in 2007 and from the Danish Writers’ School in 2011. He received the Montana Literary Award in 2011 for The Skin Is the Elastic Covering that Encases the Entire Body, was awarded a three-year work grant from the Danish government in 2013, and received the Kultur Bornholms Literary Award in 2014.
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Aaron Robertson
Aaron Robertson has written for various publications including The New York Times, The Nation, n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and more, and he is currently an editor at Literary Hub. He won a 2018 PEN/Heim grant for his translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon.
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Astrid Roemer
At the age of 19, Astrid Roemer emigrated from Suriname to the Netherlands. She identifies herself as a cosmopolitan writer. Exploring themes of race, gender, family, and identity, her poetic, unconventional prose stands in the tradition of authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. She was awarded the P.C. Hooft Award in 2016 and the three-yearly Dutch Literature Prize (Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren) in 2021. On a Woman’s Madness, her English-language debut in Lucy Scott’s translation, was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Her novel DealersDochter (2023) was nominated for the Boon Literature Prize, a prestigious literary award given annually to the best book originally written in Dutch.
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Santiago Roncagliolo
Santiago Roncagliolo is a Peruvian novelist and investigative journalist. His first novel, Red April, won the Premio Alfaguara in 2006 and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2011. In 2010 Granta named him one of its twenty-two Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists. He contributes to El País and other leading Spanish-language newspapers.