Winner of the 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim translation prize for lifetime achievement, Suzanne Jill Levine has devoted her life to practicing, investigating, and teaching the art of literary translation. The ascent of Latin American literature in the anglophone world since the Latin Boom and the current state of the art of translation are inseparable from her more than fifty years of work.

Her translations of critical Latin American authors profoundly impacted and broadened the variety of Hispanic literature in translation with innovative works by such writers as Clarice Lispector, Cecilia Vicuña, Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Puig, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and she has championed many gender-fluid and gay authors.

A scholar, prolific translator, bilingual writer and poet, and mentor to scores of essential translators active in our field today, Levine’s brilliance, famous sense of humor, and scholarly writing have been crucial to the development of the field of Translation Studies and have left a profound mark on the North-South dialogue.

To be published by Bloomsbury Press, April 2025, Unfaithful is an odyssey of this creative translator of Latin American literature, taking us back to the times of a young woman who was learning her art and navigating complex relationships, sometimes audaciously, in a pre #MeToo world dominated by men.