Susan Bernofsky

Susan Bernofsky is a writer and the prizewinning translator of works by Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck, Hermann Hesse, and many others—including Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Her most recent book, Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. For her translations, she has received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. A Guggenheim, Cullman, and Berlin Prize fellow, she runs the program in literary translation at Columbia University and is currently working on a new translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for W.W. Norton. Her translation of Yoko Tawada’s novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel appeared earlier this year from New Directions.