Suzanne Brøgger was born in 1944 and, after some years as a travel writer in the 1960s, published her first book, Deliver Us from Love (1973), an amalgam of essays, fiction, fantasy and memoir—which, in English translation, caught the attention, and praise, of Henry Miller. More than 20 books followed and a multitude of prizes. Her autobiographical trilogy of liberation, experimentation, and identity—Crème Fraiche (1978), Yes (1984), and Transparence (1993)—are perhaps the centerpiece of her oeuvre and placed her centrally in contemporary Danish culture. More recent volumes include The Jade Cat (1997), A Fighting Pig’s Too Tough to Eat & Other Prose Texts (Norvik Press, 1997), Linda Evangelista Olsen (2001), and Soelve (2006). Her play, After the Orgy (1991), received The Scena Drama Award, Washington, DC, for best European play. Ms. Brøgger has been a member of the Danish Academy since 1997.

Siri Hustvedt was born in Northfield, Minnesota on February 19, 1955. In 1978, she moved to New York City, and in 1986 received a PhD in English from Columbia University. She is the author of a book of poems, Reading to You, two books of essays, Mysteries of the Rectangle on painting, A Plea for Eros on various subjects, four novels The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, The Sorrows of an American and a neurological memoir, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. Her fifth novel The Summer Without Men will be published in the spring of 2011. Her work has been translated into twenty-nine languages.

Tiina Nunnally has translated over fifty books from the Scandinavian languages into English. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In 2004 she was the recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship. Her translations include Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg, and The Royal Physician's Visit by Per Olov Enquist. She has also done new translations of Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren and Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen. In 2009 the Swedish Academy presented Nunnally with a special award for her contributions to "introducing Swedish culture abroad." She makes her living as a freelance literary translator and frequently gives lectures and workshops on translation. She lives in Albuquerque.

David Rieff is a New York-based journalist and author. During the 1990s, he covered conflicts in Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Liberia), the Balkans (Bosnia and Kosovo), and Central Asia. Now a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, he has written extensively about Iraq, and, more recently, about Latin America. He is the author of eight books, including Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West and A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. His memoir of his mother's final illness, Swimming in a Sea of Death, appeared in January 2008. Based in New York City, Rieff is currently working on a book about the global food crisis.

Lytton Smith's translation from the Icelandic of Bragi Olafsson's novel Sendiherrann (The Ambassador) is forthcoming from Open Letter Books (Fall 2010). He is also the author of a collection of poems, The All-Purpose Magical Tent, which was awarded the Nightboat Poetry Prize by Terrance Hayes and published by Nightboat Books in March 2009. A poetry chapbook, Monster Theory, was selected by Kevin Young for a New York Chapbook Fellowship and published by the Poetry Society of America (2008). He was a founding Executive Committee member of the Center for Literary Translation in Columbia University's School of the Arts, and co-organized with Idra Novey, the third biennial Graduate Student Translation Conference, at Columbia University in 2008.

Judith Thurman, a Staff Writer at The New Yorker, is the author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of A Storyteller, which won the 1983 National Book Award for Non-Fiction; Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, winner of the 1999 Salon and Los Angeles Times Book Awards for Biography; and Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire, published by FSG in 2007, a collection of her essays from twenty years at The New Yorker. Ms. Thurman was the 2007 winner of the Rungstedlund Prize and the 2004 winner of the Harold D. Vursell Award for prose style, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages.

 

 

2009 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation

Selection Committee

Wendy Gimbel holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and is the author of Edith Wharton: Orphancy and Survival (Praeger). Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Vogue, and Mirabella, among other publications. Havana Dreams: a story of Cuba (Knopf), her most recent book, was a New York Times Notable Book of the year for 1998. She has two grown sons, two grandchildren, and lives with her husband, Douglas Small Liebhafsky, in New York City.

Alma Guillermoprieto, a Mexican-born journalist, writes in English about Latin America for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and National Geographic Magazine. Her most recent book, Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution (Pantheon), was translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen. Ms. Guillermoprieto is also the author of Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America, The Heart that Bleeds: Latin America Now, and Samba.

Aurelio Major is a poet, translator and editor. He was editorial director of Octavio Paz's Editorial Vuelta, and of Tusquets Editores, among other publishers in Mexico and Barcelona, and is currently co-founding editor of the Spanish edition of Granta magazine and editorial consultant for several European publishing groups. He has translated the work of George Oppen, Michael Hamburger, Charles Tomlinson, and as of late, Basil Bunting (2004), among other poets and essayists. His edition, with an introduction, to Edmund Wilson's Selected Writings was published in 2008. He is the Spanish translator of Susan Sontag's work since 2002.

David Rieff is a New York-based journalist and author. During the nineteen-nineties, he covered conflicts in Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Liberia), the Balkans (Bosnia and Kosovo), and Central Asia. Now a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, he has written extensively about Iraq, and, more recently, about Latin America. He is the author of eight books, including Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West and A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. His memoir of his mother's final illness, Swimming in a Sea of Death, was published last year. Based in New York City, Rieff is currently working on a book about the global food crisis.

Ninón Lavernia Rodríguez holds a Master of Arts degree in English and American Literature from the University of Miami and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Romance Languages and Literature from the University of Chicago. Ms. Rodríguez, a product of a lifelong cross-cultural interdisciplinary education, has been on the faculty of Miami Dade College for over 30 years. Currently she teaches Humanities in the Department of Arts and Philosophy. Ms. Rodríguez is the recipient of two Learning Innovation Grants: one for creating a Humanities Website, the other for designing a Humanities/English Composition Learning Community. Ms. Rodríguez was born in La Habana, Cuba and is married to Raul L. Rodríguez, AIA who practices architecture in Miami with their son Raul Francisco.

Judith Thurman a Staff Writer at The New Yorker, is the author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of A Storyteller, which won the 1983 National Book Award for Non-Fiction; Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, winner of the 1999 Salon and Los Angeles Times Book Awards for Biography; and Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire, published by FSG in 2007, a collection of her essays from twenty years at The New Yorker. Ms. Thurman's translations of Louise Labé and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz appear in The Penguin Book of Women Poets. Her own work has been translated into 13 languages.

 

 

2008 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation

Selection Committee

Susan Bernofsky is a scholar, teacher and literary translator.  She is the recent recipient of an NEH grant and Lannan Foundation Residency Award to support her work on a critical biography of the Swiss-German novelist and short prose author Robert Walser, which received previous support from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her book Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe appeared in 2005 in the Kritik series from Wayne State University Press. Her translation of Robert Walser's novel The Assistant, a PEN Translation Fund selection, appeared in 2007 from New Directions, as did her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel The Book of Words, and two more of her translations are forthcoming from New Directions: The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada, and The Tanners by Robert Walser, for which she received an NEA grant last year.  Other recent translations include Hesse's Siddhartha (Modern Library, 2006) and The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck (New Directions, 2005), which received a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award and the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize. During the 2007-2008 academic year she has been teaching in the literature program at Sarah Lawrence College.  She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University in St. Louis.

Breon Mitchell is Professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Indiana University, where he also serves as Director of The Lilly Library. A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, he has been translating contemporary German literature for over twenty years. In addition to Uwe Timm's Morenga, his more recent translations include a new version of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, The Silent Angel by Heinrich Böll, the collected short stories of Siegfried Lenz, and Marcel Beyer’s Spies. His national translation awards include the ATA German Literary Prize, the ALTA Translation Prize, the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award, and the Kurt and Helen Wolff Prize.

David Rieff is a contributing writer to the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He has covered wars and humanitarian emergencies from Bosnia to Iraq, and is the author of eight books. In the spring of 2004, his mother, Susan Sontag, was diagnosed with MDS from which she died nine months later despite having undergone a bone marrow transplant. Her struggle to live is the subject of Mr. Rieff's most recent book, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir.

Krishna Winston joined the faculty of Wesleyan University in 1970. She earned her B.A at Smith College and her Ph.D. at Yale. A specialist in 20th-century German drama and fiction, she wrote her dissertation on the playwright Ödön von Horváth. She has translated twenty-four books and numerous shorter works and has received the Kurt and Helen Wolff and Schlegel-Tieck prizes for translation. Since 2001 she has served on the Wolff Prize jury. Among the authors she has translated are Goethe, Christoph Hein, Golo Mann, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Günter Grass, and Peter Handke. At Wesleyan she coordinates the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and serves as the Campus Fulbright Program Advisor. In 2007 she was apppointed Dean of the Arts and Humanities. She is currently translating Werner Herzog’s book on the making of the film Fitzcarraldo and Peter Handke’s Don Juan.

John E. Woods is the distinguished translator of many books—most notably Arno Schmidt’s Evening Edged in Gold, for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize in 1981; Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize in 1987; Christoph Ransmayr’s Terrors of Ice and Darkness, the Last World (for which he was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1991), and The Dog King; Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain (for which, together with his translation of Arno Schmidt’s Nobodaddy’s Children, he was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 1996), Doctor Faustus, and Joseph and His Brothers; Ingo Schulze’s 33 Moments of Happiness, Simple Stories, and New Lives. He received the prestigious Goethe Medallion presented by the Goethe Institut on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2008. He lives in Berlin, Germany.

Maja Zade was born in Germany in 1972, and grew up in Sweden. She studied English Literature at London University and at Queen’s University, Canada, then theatre production at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London. From 1997-99 she was Senior Reader at the Royal Court Theatre, London. Since 1999, she has been Dramaturg at the Schaubuehne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin. She has translated several plays from Swedish and German into English, including Lars Norén’s Blood, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Push up, Falk Richter’s God is a DJ, Marius von Mayenburg’s Fireface, Eldorado, The Cold Child, The Ugly One, and Moving Target. Her translations from English into German include Caryl Churchill’s Drunk enough to say I love you?, Lars von Trier’s Dogville, Manderlay, and Breaking the Waves.