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August is Women in Translation Month – the annual celebration of women writers from
around the world, writing in languages other than English.
Join local translators Allison Markin Powell (Japanese), Tess Lewis (French, German) and Ellen Elias-Bursac (Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian) for a conversation about women writers and women translators—who gets
translated, how, and why? What strange, new worlds are waiting to be discovered in these
books? Come and bring your own recommendations. Here’s to reading beyond our immediate horizons (or, as the Germans say: past the rim of our
plates).Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She received
the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami.
Her other translations and co-translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, and
Kaoru Takamura. She is a founding member of the translator collectives Cedilla & Co. and
Strong Women, Soft Power, and maintains the database Japanese Literature in English.
Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by
Walter Benjamin, Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, and Montaigne. A Guggenheim, NEA and
Berlin Prize Fellow, she was awarded the 2017 PEN Award for Translation. She is an Advisory
Editor for The Hudson Review and curator of the Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s only
German language literature festival. www.tesslewis.org
Ellen Elias-Bursac translates fiction and non-fiction from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. Her
translation of David Albahari's novel Götz and Meyer was given the 2006 ALTA National
Translation Award. Her book Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes
Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War and her work as a translator were given the Mary Zirin Prize
in 2015. She is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.
