Sean Cotter

Romanian Literature in Translation

Writer and translator Jennifer Croft will host renowned Romanian translator Sean Cotter to discuss his adventures in Romanian fiction, including most recently with Mircea Cărtărescu, an author frequently thought to be in the running for the Nobel Prize. Cotter's translation of Cărtărescu's novel Solenoid (Deep Vellum) was named one of the best books of 2022 by by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and The Financial Times.

An award-winning translator and scholar of translation, Sean Cotter has translated many works of Romanian literature, including Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding: the Left Wing (Archipelago Books, 2013) and Magda Cârneci’s FEM (Deep Vellum Books, 2021). His selection of Nichta Stănescu’s poetry, Wheel with a Single Spoke (Archipelago Books, 2012), won the Best Translated Book Award and was supported by a previous National Endowment for the Arts grant. He first lived in Romania as a Peace Corps volunteer. His monograph, Literary Translation and the Idea of a Minor Romania (University of Rochester Press, 2014), won the Society for Romanian Studies Biennial Book Prize. He is professor of literature and translation studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel Amadou (forthcoming from Bloomsbury US and Scribe UK in 2023), the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the author of Serpientes y escaleras and Notes on Postcards, as well as the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the International Booker, longlisted for the National Book Award), Sylvia Molloy’s Dislocations, and Sebastián Martínez Daniell’s Two Sherpas. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from Northwestern University.