Writers & Translators
Translators and authors published by Two Lines Press and Calico.
Wolfgang Hilbig
Wolfgang Hilbig was born in 1941 in the coal-mining region of Meuselwitz, Saxony; his father fell in the battle of Stalingrad. Hilbig worked as a stoker in East Germany’s industrial wasteland, and his densely poetic texts literally emerged from the boiler-room. But he was too independent and his work too dark to fit in with the new breed of working-class poets fostered by the German Democratic Republic. An autodidact, he read voraciously, and was influenced by German Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Bob Dylan. In 1985, Hilbig moved to West Germany, but remained a profoundly East German writer, addressing the conflicts of his Eastern-Western existence with an intensity that made him one of Germany’s most important postwar writers. In 2002 Hilbig was awarded the Büchner Prize, Germany’s most prestigious literary award, for his life’s work. He died in 2007 after a long struggle with cancer, leaving a substantial oeuvre of poetry, short prose, novellas, and novels. (Photo credit: 3:AM Magazine)
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Luka Holmegaard
Luka Holmegaard (he/they; b. 1990) is an award-winning Danish author of fiction, essays, and poetry. He made his debut with the novel Emma Emma in 2015, followed by Graceland in 2017. LOOK (2020) is a genre-defying work about the role of clothing in literature, in creating and reshaping gender, in political protests, in power relations, in sex and love, and in the precarious labor market. LOOK was critically acclaimed in both Denmark and Germany and nominated for the Politikens Literature Prize. The Ocean in Your Mouth is his fourth book.
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Urszula Honek
In addition to White Nights, Urszula Honek is the author of three poetry books, each of which received numerous awards. She has held scholarships from the Maria Anna Siemieńska Grazella Foundation (2016), as well as from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2017). Urszula also received the Kraków UNESCO City of Literature Prize, in 2020, and the Adam Włodek Prize, in 2021. Białe noce, (White Nights), her first prose collection, was nominated for both Polityka’s Passport Award and the Grand Continent Prize, in 2022, and in 2023 it was nominated for the Witold Gombrowicz Literary Prize and won the Conrad Award. Urszula has also won the Kościelski Award, which is given to the most promising Polish writer under the age of 40.
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Janet Hong
Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. She received the 2018 TA First Translation Prize and the 2018 LTI Korea Translation Award for her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale, which was also a finalist for the 2018 PEN Translation Prize and the 2018 National Translation Award. Other recent translations include Ha Seong-nan’s Bluebeard’s First Wife and Kwon Yeo-sun’s Lemon. (Photo credit: courtesy of the author)
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Sophie Hughes
Sophie Hughes is a British literary translator who primarily translates from Spanish to English. She has translated more than a dozen books, including the works of José Revueltas and Enrique Vila-Matas for New Directions. She was shortlisted for the 2019 and 2020 International Booker Prize.
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Zhu Hui
Zhu Hui was born in Jiangsu, China. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Yu hua and author of four novels and more than eighty short stories. His awards include the Wang Zengqi Award and the 2018 Lu Xun Literary Prize, China’s most prestigious literary award.
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William M. Hutchins
William M. Hutchins has translated many works of Arabic literature into English including Return of the Spirit by Tawfiq al-Hakim, The Cairo Trilogy by Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and The Fetishists by Ibrahim al-Koni. His translation of New Waw by al-Koni won the ALTA National Prose Translation Award for 2015. A three-time National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Hutchins has published translations from the Arabic in The Brooklyn Rail, Banipal, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere.
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Mahbouba Ibrahimi
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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.
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AJ Javaheri
AJ Javaheri is an Iranian born and raised literary translator, currently based in St. Louis. Her main focus is translating contemporary Iranian literature from Farsi.
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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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Jissa Jose
Jissa Jose’s debut novel, published here as Many and Beautiful Things, was published in 2021 in India as Mudritha to much acclaim. She is the author of four other novels and three short-story collections, as well as a book on feminist aesthetics, its praxis and representation. Jose is the principal of Government Arts and Science College, Kunnamangalam, Kozhikode. She has a PhD from the University of Calicut and received a post-doctoral award from the UGC. Originally from Kottayam, she currently lives in Kozhikode district, Kerala.
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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.
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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.
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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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Jayasree Kalathil
Jayasree Kalathil is the author of The Sackclothman, a children’s book that has been translated into Malayalam, Telugu and Hindi. Her translations from Malayalam have won countless awards. As part of the global effort #readpalestine, she has translated Palestinian poetry into Malayalam, including works by Mosab Abu Toha, Mahmoud Darwish, Refaat Alareer, Hiba Abu Nada and Samih al-Qasim. Originally from Kottakkal in Malappuram district, Kerala, Jayasree currently lives in the New Forest in Hampshire, UK.
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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.