Writers & Translators
Translators and authors published by Two Lines Press and contributors to the Calico series.
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.
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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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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.
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Jay Boss Rubin
Jay Boss Rubin is a writer and translator from Portland, Oregon. His translations from Swahili to English have been published by or are forthcoming from Two Lines Press, Yale University Press, Asymptote, The Common, The Hopkins Review and Northwest Review. He is a graduate of the Queens College, City University of New York MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation.
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Galina Rymbu
Galina Rymbu is, in the words of Time Magazine, “part of a new generation of Russian poets taking up language as a form of political protest, challenging state, societal, and patriarchal norms with poetry that draws from personal experience.” Her poetry collection Life in Space, translated by Joan Brooks and others, was published recently by Ugly Duckling Presse. She edits F-Pis’mo, an online magazine for feminist literature and theory, and is the coeditor of the translation anthology F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, released in the US and the UK by Isolarii.
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Kim Sagwa
Kim Sagwa is one of South Korea’s most acclaimed emerging writers. She is the author of several novels, story collections, and works of nonfiction, and has been shortlisted for numerous literary awards. She lives in New York City.
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Pirkko Saisio
Pirkko Saisio (b. 1949) studied drama and completed her actor’s training in 1975. Her debut novel The Course of Life (Elämänmeno, 1975) won the J. H. Erkko Award. Saisio has been nominated for the Finlandia Prize seven times, winning it in with The Red Book of Farewells (Punainen erokirja, 2003). She has, among other awards, received Aleksis Kivi Prize and State Literature Award. Apart from novels, she has written numerous plays and scripts for film and television and is a well-known theatre director.
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Toni Sala
Toni Sala is the author of over a dozen novels and works of nonfiction. In 2005 he was awarded the National Literature Prize by the Catalan government, and he has also received many other honors for his writing. He lives in Barcelona.
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Julia Sanches
Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Dolores Reyes, Daniel Galera, and Eva Baltasar, among others. Her shorter translations have appeared in various magazines and periodicals, including Words Without Borders, Granta, Tin House, and Guernica. A founding member of Cedilla & Co., Julia sits on the Council of the Authors Guild.
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Igiaba Scego
Igiaba Scego, born in Rome in 1974 to a family of Somali origins, is a writer and journalist. She is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, and her memoir La mia casa è dove sono won Italy’s prestigious Mondello Prize. She is a frequent contributor to the magazine Internazionale and the supplement to La Repubblica, Il Venerdì di Repubblica.
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Olga Sedakova
Olga Sedakova is one of Russia’s most revered poets today. Born in 1949, she emerged as a writer in the late Soviet Underground. In recent decades she has primarily published translations, essays, and cultural criticism, reflecting her growing importance as a voice of conscience. Sedakova’s poetry reflects a “longing for world culture” (Mandelstam) as well as an ongoing attempt to articulate an ethic and aesthetic grounded in Russian cultural traditions.
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Karima Shabrang
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Ahmed Shafie
Ahmed Shafie is an Egyptian poet, novelist, and translator. He has published three poetry collections and two novels. His most recent collection is 77 (2017). He has translated Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, and others. Shafie blogs at “Qera’at Ahmed Shafie.”
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Fatemeh Shams
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Chen Si’an
Chen Si’an is a playwright, theater director, poet, short story writer, and literary translator. She was born in Inner Mongolia and now lives and works in Beijing. She has written three collections of short stories and six plays. Her plays have been performed at the Royal Court Theatre, the Edinburgh International Festival, the National Theatre Company of China, and the Beijing International Fringe Festival. She is executive editor of Wings Poetry and founder of the international script-reading event Sound and Fury.
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Ekaterina Simonova
Ekaterina Simonova is a poet from Nizhny Tagil. Now in Ekaterinburg, Simonova has published six poetry collections and was shortlisted for the 2020 Andrei Bely Prize. Simonova holds a prominent place in the contemporary vanguard of queer and feminist Russophone poetics. In her poems, Simonova plays with prose, deftly constructing simultaneously joyous and melancholy portraits of women and the objects that make a life. Simonova also edits the woman-run poetry series “InVersia.”
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Ho Sok Fong
Ho Sok Fong is the author of Lake Like a Mirror (Two Lines Press) and Maze Carpet. Her literary awards include the Chiu Ko Fiction Prize (2015), the 25th China Times Short Story Prize, and the 30th United Press Short Story Prize. She has a PhD in Chinese Language & Literature from NTU Singapore, and lives in Malaysia.
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Adam J. Sorkin
Adam J. Sorkin has translated more than seventy books of contemporary Romanian poetry. His recent translations include Dangerous Caprices by Nora Iuga, translated with Diana Manole (Naked Eye Publishing); California (on the Someș) by Ruxandra Cesereanu, translated with the poet (Black Widow Press); Dinner with Marx by Matei Vișniec, translated with Lidia Vianu (New Meridian Arts); and most recently, Canting Arms by Emilian Galaicu-Păun, with multiple co-translators (Deep Vellum). (Photo credit: Nancy Sorkin)
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Mia Spangenberg
Mia Spangenberg translates from Finnish, Swedish, and German into English. Her work has been published in Finland and the UK, and appeared in journals such as LitHub and Asymptote. She holds a Ph.D. in Scandinavian studies from the University of Washington, Seattle, where she resides with her family.