Tiina Nunnally


Tiina Nunnally is an American author and translator of Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish literature. She also writes her own novels and young adult books.

Early life and education

Nunnally was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and St. Louis Park, Minnesota.
She was an AFS exchange student to Århus, Denmark in 1969 and 1970. In a 2010 interview with Joanne Matzenbacher, Nunnally said that she learned to speak Danish during this time as an exchange student.
She received an MA in 1976 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhC from the University of Washington in 1979.
She is an affiliate instructor with the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington.

Career

Nunnally is a translator of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, who sometimes uses the pseudonym Felicity David when edited into UK English. Her translation of Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross by Sigrid Undset won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 2001, and Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow won the American Translators Association's Lewis Galantière Prize.
Her first novel, Maija, won a Governor's Writers Award from the State of Washington in 1996. Since then two more of her novels have been published.
The Swedish Academy honored Nunnally in 2009 with a special award for her contributions to "the introduction of Swedish culture abroad".
In 2013, Nunnally was appointed a Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for her work in translating works from Norwegian to English.
In 2019, Nunnally's translation of the collected Norwegian folktales by Norwegian folklorists Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe was published by the University of Minnesota Press as "The Complete and Original Norwegian Folktales of Asbjørnsen and Moe", and included a foreword by Neil Gaiman. It was the first new English translation of the work in over 150 years, and the first English translation to include all 60 original folktales. In the edition's foreword, author Neil Gaiman wrote of Nunnally's translation, "Each story feels honed, as if it were recently collected from a storyteller who knew how to tell it and who had, in turn, heard it from someone who knew how to tell it." Nunnally's 2019 translation received considerable praise, from sources including the Journal of Folklore Research and the Wall Street Journal.

Personal life

After 2002 she lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her husband Steven T. Murray, both full-time freelance literary translators. Murray died in 2018.

Selected translations

Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg ; Kristin Lavransdatter I: The Wreath by Sigrid Undset Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife by Sigrid Undset Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross by Sigrid Undset Don't Look Back by Karin Fossum under pseudonym Felicity David He Who Fears the Wolf by Karin Fossum under pseudonym Felicity David Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen When the Devil Holds the Candle by Karin Fossum under pseudonym Felicity David Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, Deluxe Classics edition Chronicler of the Winds by Henning Mankell Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, a new translation, illustrated by Lauren Child The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen

Honors and awards