Natasha Wimmer


Natasha Wimmer is an American translator best known for her translations of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and The Savage Detectives from Spanish into English.

Biography

Natasha Wimmer grew up in Iowa. She learned Spanish in Spain, where she spent four years growing up. She studied Spanish literature at Harvard University.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and children.

Career

Her first job after graduating was at Farrar, Straus & Giroux from 1996 to 1999 as an assistant and then managing editor. While working there, Wimmer produced her first translation, the Dirty Havana Trilogy by Cuban novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.
Wimmer then worked at Publishers Weekly, before leaving to work on Roberto Bolaño's books full-time. On her work in publishing and translation, Wimmer has said: "I had decided in college that I would never be a fiction writer, but I knew I wanted to be as close to books as I could. Publishing was one way, and translating turned out to be a better way for me."
She has also translated Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa's The Language of Passion, The Way to Paradise, and Letters to a Young Novelist; and Marcos Giralt Torrente's Father and Son, among other works.
Wimmer has written for publications such as The Nation, ''The [New York Times], and The Believer''. She teaches translation at Princeton University.

Awards

Wimmer received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant in 2007 and the PEN Translation Prize in 2009. She won the National [Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction] in 2008 for her translation of 2666 and an Award in Literature from the American [Academy of Arts and Letters] in 2010.
Spanish writer Gabriela Ybarra's The Dinner Guest, in Wimmer's translation, was nominated for the 2018 International Booker Prize.

Translations

Of [Roberto Bolaño]

Of [Álvaro Enrigue]

Of [Nona Fernández]

  • Space Invaders
  • Voyager: Constellations of Memory
  • ''The Twilight Zone''

Of [Mario Vargas Llosa]

Of [Gabriel Zaid]

  • The Secret of Fame
  • ''So Many Books''

Of other authors