Writers & Translators
Translators and authors published by Two Lines Press and Calico.
Mahbouba Ibrahimi
Books
Sabrina Jaszi
Sabrina Jaszi is a literary translator based in Alameda, CA, working from Uzbek, Ukrainian, and Russian. Her published translations include the works of Salomat Vafo, Suhbat Aflatuni, O‘tkir Hoshimov, Reed Grachev, Nadezhda Teffi, and Alisa Ganieva. Her co-translation with Roman Ivashkiv of Andriy Sodomora’s The Tears and Smiles of Things (Academic Studies Press) received the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Best Translation Prize for 2023–24. She is also a writer with stories and essays published in StoryQuarterly, J Journal, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Turkoslavia, a collective and journal devoted to Turkic and Slavic literature in translation. To learn more, visit Turkoslavia.com.
Books
Ellen Jones
Ellen Jones is a literary translator from Spanish to English, an editor, and an occasional writer based in Mexico City. Her book Language in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. You can find her at www.ellencjones.com.
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Cristina Judar
Cristina Judar is a writer from São Paulo. Her award-winning books Roteiros para uma vida curta and Oito do Sete challenge literary categories, traversing boundaries between poetry and prose. She has also written Questions for a Live Writing at the Queen Mary University of London and co-organized the anthologies A resistência dos vaga-lumes and Pandemônio.
Books
Maria Judite de Carvalho
Maria Judite de Carvalho (1921–1998) published nine collections of short stories, a novella, and two collections of crónicas over her lifetime. Widely celebrated in Portugal, she spent her career in journalism, working as an editor and columnist, and was also known for her French translations and paintings. Two Lines Press is the first to make her books available in English.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
Damir Karakaš
Damir Karakaš was born in 1967 in the village of Plašćica, in the Croatian region of Lika, known for strong winters, wolves, and inventor Nikola Tesla. He worked in Zagreb and Split as a journalist, reporting from the front lines of the war in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. From 2001 through 2007 he lived in Bordeaux and Paris, where he supported himself by playing the accordion. One of the most respected writers in Croatia and the former Yugoslavia, Karakaš is winner of prestigious domestic and international literary awards. He has published seven novels, three short story collections, and a travelog. His novels have been translated into ten languages, including the first translation of a work of Croatian literature into Arabic. A film based on Celebration four major awards (Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Male Lead, Best Cinematography) at the 2024 Pula Summer Film Festival. He is the father of three daughters and currently lives in Zagreb. (Photo Credit: Tom Čuveljak)
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
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)
Books
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.
Books
Hon Lai Chu
Hon Lai Chu is one of Hong Kong’s most prominent writers and the author of several novels, including Mending Bodies, Degravitation Zone, and A Dictionary of Two Cities, co-authored with Dorothy Tse, which won the Hong Kong Book Prize. Her most recent works are Half-Eclipse and Darkness under the Sun, two diaristic essay collections about Hong Kong. She has also received accolades from Taiwan’s Unitas Literary Association, the Liang Shiu-chiu Literature Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, and the Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature, among many others.
Books
Christopher Larkosh
Christopher Larkosh (1964–2020) was a professor of Portuguese at UMass Dartmouth, where he researched and tought in the areas of Portuguese-to-English translation, contemporary Brazilian literature, and literary and cultural theory, including queer theory, which he taught as a guest professor at the National University of Mar del Plata in Argentina. Aside from translating Wilson Bueno, João Gilberto Noll, and other queer Brazilian authors, he was instrumental in advancing research in queer translation studies internationally.
Books
Juliana Leite
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.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
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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