Best European Fiction 2013 (51 page)

MARIE REDONNET
was born Martine l'Hospitalier in 1948 in Paris. Her first publication was a volume of poetry,
Le Mort & Cie
, in 1985 (
Dead Man & Company
, 2005). Her works since include short story collections, novels, and dramatic works, are available in English translation:
Forever Valley
(1992),
Hôtel Splendid
(1994),
Rose Méllie Rose
(1994)
, Candy Story
(1995), and
Nevermore
(1996). In 2006-2007, she was visiting professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She currently divides her time between Morocco and Aix en Provence.

GUNDEGA REPŠE
was born in 1960 in Riga, Latvia. A graduate of the Latvian State Art Academy, Repše made her literary debut at nineteen with her short story “A Camel in Olde Towne of Riga.” Since then, she has authored five short-story collections and seven novels, and she is considered one of contemporary Latvia’s most brilliant writers. Repše’s interest in cultural processes and art are apparent in her biographical novel-essays on Latvian artists and countless reviews and columns in major literary magazines and newspapers. Repše’s work has also been adapted for the stage in Latvia—the play
Stigma
at the Daile Theater; the play
Smagais metals
(Heavy Metal), based on the novel
Alvas kliedziens
(The Tin Scream), at the New Riga Theater; and the play Juras velni (Sea Devils) at the National Theater.

ELOY TIZÓN
was born in Madrid in 1964. His novel
Velocidad de los jardines
(1992) was hailed by critics as one of the most interesting Spanish novels of the last 25 years. His novel
Seda salvaje
(1995) was finalist for the Thirteenth Premio Herralde prize. Excerpts of his work have been translated into English, French, Italian, German and, Finnish. His most recently novel is
Parpadeos
(2006).

IEVA TOLEIKYTĖ
was born in 1989 in Vilnius, Lithuania. She is currently studying Scandinavian philology at Vilnius University. She became interested in literature in early childhood and began writing quite young—at first some abstract sketches and poems before going on to short stories. In 2009 her first collection of short stories,
Garstyciunamas
(The House of Mustard), was published; “The Eye of the Maples,” which comes from that collection, is her first piece to be translated into English. She has also published poems and short stories in various Lithuanian magazines.

MIKLÓS VAJDA
was born in 1931 and is editor emeritus of
The Hungarian Quarterly
, for which he worked from 1964, becoming editor in 1990. His “essay-memoir”
Anyakép, amerikai keretben
(Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame) was published in Hungarian in 2010. He has translated numerous American and British plays into Hungarian, and he currently lives in Budapest.

Translator Biographies

ANNA ASLANYAN
is a journalist and translator. She co-edits
3:
AM
magazine and writes for various publications, mainly on books and the arts. Her translations into Russian include works of fiction by Tom McCarthy, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Mavis Gallant, and Zadie Smith. She has translated a number of essays and short stories from Russian into English.

SHUSHAN AVAGYAN
is the translator from Russian of
Energy of Delusion, Bowstring,
and
A Hunt for Optimism
by Viktor Shklovsky, and, from Armenian,
I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian
. She currently teaches at the American University of Armenia.

FLORIN BICAN
has published English translations in Britain, Ireland, the United States, Singapore, and Romania. His translations from English into Romanian include Lewis Carroll’s
The Hunting of the Snark
and T. S. Eliot’s
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
. Since 2006 Florin Bican has been in charge of the Romanian Cultural Institute program “Translators in the Making.”

ALISTAIR IAN BLYTH
lives in Bucharest and has translated fiction, poetry, and philosophy by writers from Romania and the Republic of Moldova. The authors he has translated include Max Blecher, Gellu Naum, Ion Creanga, Filip Florian, Lucian Dan Teodorovici, Bogdan Suceava, Iulian Ciocan, and Constantin Noica.

CHRISTOPHER BUXTON
first came to Bulgaria in 1977 as an English teacher. He has had three novels published in Bulgaria:
Far from the Danube
,
Prudence and the Red Baron
, and
Radoslava and the Viking Prince
. He has translated a significant number of classic and contemporary Bulgarian texts including new work for the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. He maintains a website at www.christopherbuxton.com.

MARGARET JULL COSTA
has been a literary translator for over twenty years, translating, among others, Javier Marías, Eça de Queiroz, and Bernardo Atxaga. Her work has brought her various prizes, the most recent of which was the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for
The Elephant’s Journey
by José Saramago.

VICTORIA CRIBB
was born in England but lived in Iceland for several years. Her translations from Icelandic include
Stone Tree
by Gyrðir Elíasson and
From the Mouth of the Whale
by Sjón, which was shortlisted for the UK Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012. She is currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of Cambridge.

JENNIFER CROFT
is a writer and translator of Spanish, Polish, and Ukrainian. She is a founding editor of
The Buenos Aires Review.

ROBERT FERGUSON
is a renowned translator of Scandinavian literature. He has also written biographies of Nobel Laureate-winning author Knut Hamsun, author Henry Miller, and playwright Henrik Ibsen.

WILL FIRTH
was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. Since 1991 he has been living in Berlin, Germany, where he works as a freelance translator of literature and the humanities. He translates from Russian, Macedonian, and all variants of Serbo-Croatian.

MARGITA GAILITIS
was born in Riga, Latvia, and grew up in Canada. In 1998 she returned to Latvia to work on a Canadian International Development Agency-sponsored project translating Latvian laws into English. Her poetry has been published in Canada and the US, and she is the recipient of Ontario Arts and Canada Council awards. In 2011, she was awarded the Order of the Three Stars by the President of Latvia.

ROGER GREENWALD
, an American poet and translator based in Toronto, has won the CBC Literary Award twice (poetry, travel literature). His books include
Connecting Flight
(poems); and the translations
Through Naked Branches: Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas; North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen,
winner of the Lewis Galantière Award;
Picture World
, by Niels Frank; and
A Story about Mr. Silberstein,
a novel by Erland Josephson.

JEAN HARRIS
has published fiction, literary criticism, translations, book reviews, and literary dispatches. She won a translation grant from UC-I’s International Center for Writing and Translation for her work on Ştefan Bănulescu’s Mistretii erau blazi. She has directed the Observer Translation Project at translations.observatorcultural.ro, which translates Romanian fiction into numerous languages.

CELIA HAWKESWORTH
is emerita Senior Lecturer in Serbian and Croatian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London. She has published numerous articles and several books on Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian literature, including the studies
Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West
,
Voices in the Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia, and Zagreb: A Cultural History
. She has translated numerous works from Serbo-Croatian, including Vedrana Rudan’s
Night
and several books by Dubravka Ugresic.

HILDI HAWKINS
is a writer and translator and the London Editor of Books from Finland. She is also the editor of things magazine, a journal of writings about objects, their pasts, presents, and futures.

ELIZABETH HEIGHWAY
is a literary and medical translator. She was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Chicago, and holds an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Birmingham. She translates from Georgian and French, and is the editor and translator of Dalkey Archive Press’s
Contemporary Georgian Fiction
.

AARON KERNER
is a freelance writer and translator from German,

French, and Spanish.

AMY KERNER
lives in Rhode Island, where she is working toward a PhD in Modern European History at Brown University. She translates from German and Spanish.

VIJA KOSTOFFF
is a linguist by education, and a language teacher, writer, and editor by profession. She has been collaborating with
'
Margita Gailitis for more than ten years in translating the novels, short storeis, plays, film scripts, and poetry of many of Latvia's major writers. Born in Latvia, she now resides in Niagra on the Lake, Ontario, Canada where she exercises her secondary passions for gardening and painting.

SOILA LEHTONEN
is a journalist and theater critic, and currently Editor-in-Chief of
Books from Finland
. She edited a collection of writings about the city of Helsinki together with Hildi Hawkins,
Helsinki: A Literary Companion.

DAVID LIMON
translates literature for children and adults from Slovenian into English. His translations include the prize winning novels
Fužine Blues
by Andrej Skubic and
Iqball Hotel
by Boris Kolar. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Translation at the University of Ljubljana.

ILMAR LEHTPERE
is Kristiina Ehin’s official English-language translator. He has translated nine books by her, both prose and poetry, including the Poetry Society Popescu Prize winner
The Drums of Silence
(2007) and the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation
The Scent of Your Shadow
(2010). He has also translated her dramatic works and radio broadcasts. His translations of Kristiina Ehin’s work appear regularly in leading English-language literary magazines and his collaboration with her is ongoing.

OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK
was born in Lviv, Ukraine. She moved to the United States when she was fifteen years old. She began translating Ukrainian and Russian poetry as a student at Bryn Mawr College, and has also published two books of her own poetry in Ukrainian:
Gifts to the Host
(2005) and
The Chase
(2008). In 2004 and 2007 she was the recipient of prestigious Ukrainian literary awards for young authors; since 2006, she has been living in Chicago and pursuing a doctorate in philosophy at Northwestern University.

RHETT MCNEIL
has published numerous translations from Portuguese and Spanish, including short fiction by Machado de Assis and Enrique Vila-Matas, and novels by Gonçalo M. Tavares, A. G. Porta, and António Lobo Antunes.

RACHEL MCNICHOLL
studied, lived and worked in Switzerland and Germany before returning to her native Ireland. Her career path has covered academic research, teaching translation at university, journalism, in-house book editing, and literary translation. Recent short-story translations from German include “England, I Set Foot on You in Heels” by Lydia Mischkulnig, in
Zwei Wochen England
, and “Belyed: A Fishy Story” by Gabriele Haefs in
Short Fiction in Theory and Practice.
She has also translated work by Klaus Modick, Nadja Spiegel, Yoko Tawada, and Sigrid Weigel.

NIKOLCHE MICKOSKI
teaches at the Faculty of Philology at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje and translates from English, German and Serbian. His translations include, among others, Ford’s
The Good Soldier,
and Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury,
and
Absalom, Absalom!
into Macedonian, as well as Simon Drakul’s
The White Valley
and
Žarko Kujundžiski’s Spectator
into English.

MAX POPELYSH-ROSOCHYNSKY
was born in 1986 in Simferopol, Crimea. He moved to the United States in 2006. He is currently writing a dissertation about Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry and criticism at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. He is also working on his first book of poetry in Russian.

MARILYA VETETO REESE
is Professor of German at Northern Arizona University. She was among the first US Germanists to interview and write about Turkish-German writers. The recipient of Fulbright, DAAD, and Goethe Institut support, Reese works with, translates, and has numerous publications on contemporary German authors such as Zehra Çirak and Kemal Kurt as well as on Holocaust poet Hilda Stern Cohen and on foreign language pedagogy.