Writers & Translators
Translators and authors published by Two Lines Press and Calico.
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.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
Anne Pauly
Anne Pauly is a writer working and living in Paris. Her first book, Avant que j’oublie (Éditions Verdier, 2019) was awarded the 2020 Prix du Livre Inter and Prix Robert Walser after shortlisting for the Prix Femina, Prix Wepler, and Prix Goncourt. Anne has since written short stories for several reviews, a televised series, and a play. She is currently finishing a second novel, while working on a play for the Théâtre du Nord along with seven other writers, including Virginie Despentes, Paul B. Preciado, and Julien Delmaire.
Upcoming Events
Anne Pauly and Bruno Perreau: French Voices at the Boston Book Festival
Anne Pauly presents Before I Forget at the Boston Book Festival with Bruno Perreau.
Anne Pauly presents Before I Forget at The French Library
Anne Pauly, visiting Boston from Paris, celebrates the English publication of Before I Forget, her debut novel shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, Prix Femina, and Prix Wepler. She will be joined in conversation by Bruno Perreau, Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies at MIT.
In Before I Forget, Pauly recounts the aftermath of her father’s death and the complicated task of mourning a man who was at once a self-taught philosopher and romantic, and an alcoholic whose violence marked his family. As Anne sorts through his belongings and prepares his funeral, she tries to reconcile these contradictory versions of the man she has lost. Told with wit and tenderness, the novel is a tragicomic exploration of grief, family, class, and the complicated bonds between parents and children.
This event is part of French Voices at the Boston Book Festival(opens in a new tab), a day of engaging conversations, thought-provoking ideas, and book signings with some of today’s most exciting voices in French and Francophone literature. In partnership with Villa Albertine.
About Before I Forget
An offbeat novel for anyone who’s ever loved a monster.
When Anne’s father dies, she is left grieving a contradiction. Jean-Pierre was a man of many faces: the self-taught philosopher born into poverty; the Buddhist who marked his favorite haikus with maple leaves; the old romantic who ended every evening kissing a pixelated portrait of his late wife; and the violent bully, whose alcoholism marked his family’s life in terrible ways.
Sorting through his belongings and making funeral preparations, Anne tries to come to terms with who and what she’s lost. And what’s more, she can’t help but recognize herself in the father she spent so much of her life running from.
About French Voices at the Boston Book Festival
From Gaëlle Bélem’s vivid storytelling rooted in the history of La Réunion to Mathias Énard’s explorations of war, history, and ideology, Anne Pauly’s tragicomic exploration of family and grief, and a conversation with award-winning translators Sam Taylor and Emma Ramadan on the art of carrying a writer’s voice across languages, the program celebrates the richness and diversity of contemporary Francophone literature.
Each event will be held in English and will feature a 50-minute moderated conversation, followed by a 10-minute audience Q&A and book signing.
This is a free event, available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Anne Pauly is a writer working and living in Paris. Her first book, Avant que j’oublie (Éditions Verdier, 2019) was awarded the 2020 Prix du Livre Inter and Prix Robert Walser after shortlisting for the Prix Femina, Prix Wepler, and Prix Goncourt. Anne has since written short stories for several reviews, a televised series, and a play. She is currently finishing a second novel, while working on a play for the Théâtre du Nord along with seven other writers, including Virginie Despentes, Paul B. Preciado, and Julien Delmaire.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
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.