Susan Bernofsky

For a biography of Robert Walser

Susan Bernofsky has translated 18 books, including six by the Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, and novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Gregor von Rezzori, and others. She is Chair of the PEN Translation Committee and sits on the PEN board. She received the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the 2012 Calwer Hermann Hesse Translation Prize, as well as awards and fellowships from the American Council of of Learned Societies, the PEN Translation Fund, the NEA, the NEH, and the Lannan Foundation. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton, and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University. She is also the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe, and co-editor (with Esther Allen) of In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What it Means. Bernofsky has taught at Queens College, CUNY, and currently teaches literary translation in the MFA Writing Program of the Columbia University School of the Arts, where she serves as Director of Literary Translation. As a Leon Levy fellow she worked on a biography of Robert Walser, published by Yale University Press.

More Fellows