Writers & Translators
Translators and authors published by Two Lines Press and contributors to the Calico series.
Margaret Jull Costa
Margaret Jull Costa has been a translator for over thirty years and has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, including novelists Javier Marías, José Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga, Maria Judite de Carvalho and Eça de Queirós, as well as poets Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and Ana Luísa Amaral. Her work has brought her many prizes, among them, in 1997, the International IMPAC Literary Award, for A Heart So White by Javier Marías; in 2008, the PEN Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and in 2018, the Premio Valle-Inclán for On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes.
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Hilary Kaplan
Hilary Kaplan translated Angélica Freitas’s Rilke Shake, which won the National Translation Award and Best Translated Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2016. Her additional translations include Marília Garcia’s The Territory Is Not the Map, Paloma Vidal’s Ghosts, and poems by Ricardo Domeneck and Claudia Roquette-Pinto. She has received an NEA Translation fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund award, and a Rumos Literatura fellowship from Itaú Cultural.
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Il’ia Karagulin
Il’ia Karagulin is a poet, translator, copy editor, and doctoral student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where they research queerness, transness, and disability in twentieth-century Russian literature and poetry. Born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, they now live in New Haven, Connecticut. Their work has appeared in Hooligan Mag, Petfish, and at The Tank’s Flight Simulator.
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Martha Kelly
Martha Kelly is the author of Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic and of numerous essays and scholarly articles. She is currently completing a new translated collection of Olga Sedakova’s verse in English and working on a monograph about Sedakova with the working title “How To Be a Russian Poet: The Public Life of Olga Sedakova.” She first met Dmitry Strotsev when interviewing him for her monograph.
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Mohamed Kheir
Mohamed Kheir is a novelist, poet, short story writer, journalist, and lyricist. His short story collections Remsh Al Ein (2016) and Afarit Al Radio (2011) both received The Sawiris Cultural Award, and Leil Khargi (2001) was awarded the Egyptian Ministry of Culture Award for poetry. Slipping (Eflat Al Asabea, Kotob Khan Publishing House, 2018; Two Lines Press, 2021) is his second novel and his first to be translated into English. He lives in Egypt. Author photo by maha al turk.
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Erika Kobayashi
Erika Kobayashi is a novelist and visual artist based in Tokyo. History, memory, and radiation play an important role in her work. In her novels, Kobayashi traces the history of radiation via the lives of ordinary people over generations—particularly generations of women: mothers and daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters. Through her writing she wants to make the invisible visible, the unseen seen. Her novel Madame Curie to chōshoku o (Breakfast with Madame Curie), published in 2014 by Shueisha, was shortlisted for both the Mishima and the Akutagawa Prize. Her latest novel, the literary thriller Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (2019), about a terrorist attack on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics examines the intertwined histories of the Olympics, fascism, and nuclear technologies. “Precious Stones” was included in the collection Kanojo wa kagami no naka o nozokikomu (She looks into the mirror), published by Shueshia in 2017. (Photo credit: Mie Morimoto)
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Irina Kotova
Irina Kotova is a poet, prose writer, and essayist based in Moscow. She was born in the southern Russian city of Voronezh and holds degrees from the Voronezh State Medical Institute and from the Literary Institute in Moscow. She is the recipient of two literary awards and her work has appeared in many periodicals, including Vozdukh, Novy Mir, TextOnly, and NLO, and in four poetry collections. Her poems have been translated into Italian, Romanian, Greek, Portuguese, and English.
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Mara Faye Lethem
Mara Faye Lethem has translated novels by Jaume Cabré, David Trueba, Albert Sánchez Piñol, Javier Calvo, Patricio Pron, Marc Pastor, and Toni Sala, among others, and shorter fiction by such authors as Juan Marsé, Rodrigo Fresán, Pola Oloixarac, Teresa Colom, and Alba Dedeu. Her translation of The Whispering City, by Sara Moliner, recently received an English PEN Award, and two of her translations were nominated for the 2016 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
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Jacqueline Leung
Jacqueline Leung is a writer and translator from Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in Wasafiri, Transtext(e)s Transcultures, Gulf Coast, Asymptote, Nashville Review, SAND Journal, the Asian Review of Books, Books From Taiwan, and elsewhere. She is a translator editor at The Offing. Her excerpt of Mending Bodies is a winner of PEN Presents by the English PEN. This is her first full-length translation.
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Sophie Lewis
Sophie Lewis has been translating fiction and other literature from French since graduating from Oxford University in 2004. Following a stay in Rio de Janeiro from 2011 to 2015, she began translating from Portuguese. Her translations include works by Stendhal, Jules Verne, Marcel Aymé, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, Natalia Borges Polesso, and João Gilberto Noll.
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Jonathan Littell
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Bruno Lloret
Bruno Lloret (Santiago de Chile, 1990) is a writer and researcher. He has published Nancy (Cuneta, Santiago de Chile, 2015; Two Lines Press, 2021), which received an honorable mention for the Roberto Bolaño Award for novella, and Leña (Overol, Santiago de Chile, 2018). He currently lives in London.
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Bruna Dantas Lobato
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a fiction writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common. She was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translated Literature for The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel. Originally from Natal, Brazil, she lives in Iowa and teaches at Grinnell College. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is forthcoming in October 2024 from Grove Atlantic. (Photo Credit: Ashley Pieper)
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Idza Luhumyo
Idza Luhumyo is a Kenyan writer. She is the winner of the 2022 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing.
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Christina MacSweeney
Christina MacSweeney has an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. Her work has been recognized in a number of important awards. Her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize and also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award (2017). Her most recent translations include fiction and nonfiction works by Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Jazmina Barrera, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published translations, articles and interviews on a variety of platforms.
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Charlotte Mandell
Charlotte Mandell’s translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s La jouissance (titled Coming) was published by Fordham University Press in September 2016. She has translated more than forty books; her current project, Mathias Énard’s Compass, which recently won the Prix Goncourt, is forthcoming from New Directions Publishing in the U.S. and from Fitzcarraldo Editions in the U.K. Her translations of Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Fall of Sleep, Listening, and After Fukushima were all published by Fordham University Press.
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Layla Martínez
Layla Martínez (Madrid, 1987) is the author of two nonfiction books in Spanish, Surrogate Pregnancy (Pepitas de calabaza, 2019) and Utopia is not an Island (Episkaia, 2020), as well as stories and articles in numerous anthologies. She has translated essays and novels, writes about music for El Salto, and about television for La Última Hora. Since 2014 she has co-directed the independent publisher Antipersona. Woodworm is her first novel.
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Kit Maude
Kit Maude is a translator based in Buenos Aires. He has translated dozens of Latin American writers for a wide array of publications and writes reviews for Ñ, Otra Parte, and the Times Literary Supplement.
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Megan McDowell
Megan McDowell has translated work by many of the most important contemporary Latin American writers, including Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enriquez, Carlos Fonseca, and Lina Meruane. Her translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN award for Writing in Translation, the Premio Valle-Inclán, the Shirley Jackson Prize, and two O. Henry Prizes, and have been short- or long-listed four times for the International Booker Prize, and shortlisted once for the Kirkus Prize. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. She is from Richmond, KY and lives in Santiago, Chile.
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Mariam Meetra
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Eva Meijer
Eva Meijer is a philosopher, visual artist, writer and singer-songwriter. Her fiction and nonfiction has been translated into over twenty languages. Since the publication of her first novel in 2011, her works have been receiving numerous awards, including the Halewijnprijs honouring her oeuvre. Her books have been met enthusiastically by the Dutch but also international press including reviews in The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and The New York Review of Books. Recurring themes are language including silence, madness, nonhuman animals, and politics. Meijer also works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and Wageningen University. She writes essays and columns for NRC newspaper, and is a member of the Multispecies Art Collective.