Fiction

Women in Translation: Stories from Croatia and Kazakhstan

May 31, 2024|7:00pm

7:00 pm PDT

The Ruby SF | San Francisco, CA

This event has already taken place.

Only about 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation. Less than 30% of that tiny percentage are from women writers. And less than half are from languages other than French, Spanish, German, and Italian. English-language readers are being left in the cold when it comes to the extraordinary wealth of women writers from around the world, but not if literary translators can help it!

The Center for the Art of Translation, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ruby SF host translators Ena Selimović and Mirgul Kali to read from recent translations and talk about the challenges and successes they’ve experienced in their efforts to bring literary works from under-translated languages and women writers to English-language readers.

Translator

Ena Selimović

Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-American writer and co-founder of Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal. Her work has received support from ALTA, ACLS, and NEA. Her translation of Nebojša Lujanović’s Cloud the Color of Skin was published in May 2024, and her translation of Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie is forthcoming in early 2025. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

Translator

Mirgul Kali

Mirgul Kali translates from her native Kazakh. Her translations of short stories by classic and contemporary Kazakh writers appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Electric Literature, Exchanges, The Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast, and other publications. She received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a PEN Translates award for her translation of Baqytgul Sarmekova’s To Hell with Poets, a short story collection recently published by Tilted Axis Press. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow.