Esther Allen

Esther Allen is a writer and translator. She is a professor at Baruch College, City University of New York, where she directs the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. and in the Ph.D. Programs in  French, Comparative Literature, and Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at CUNY Graduate Center. Allen has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and a Biography Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, working on her forthcoming One Vast Question: The Life and Afterlife José Martí. Among her many books, her translation of Zama, by Antonio Di Benedetto, won the 2017 National Translation Award; she has subsequently translated DiBenedetto's The Silentiary and The Suicides. She co-founded the PEN World Voices Festival and guided the work of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund in its first seven years. For PEN International and the Institut Ramon Lull, she edited To Be Translated or Not To Be, published in English, Catalan, and German. Her essays, translations and interviews have appeared in  the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, Words Without Borders, Bomb, LitHub, the New Yorker and other publications.