Esther Allen

Esther Allen’s translation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama received the 2017 National Translation Award in Prose from the American Literary Translators Association. With support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, she then translated the other two volumes in Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation, The Silentiary (2022) and The Suicides (2025). A professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and Baruch College, Allen was named a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the French government, and her essays and translations have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation website, the Paris Review, Words Without Borders, and other publications. (Photo Credit: Caroline White)