About
Born in New York City, and a Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Suzanne Jill Levine translated over forty works of the famous Latin American Boom, fiction and poetry, beginning with the Argentine Manuel Puig’s Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers. Levine’s scholarly and non-fiction books include The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (Graywolf, 1991, reissued by Dalkey Archive), which was highly influential in the development of the field of international translation studies, and the literary biography of Manuel Puig and The Spiderwoman: His Life and Fictions (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000; reprinted by Faber & Faber, UWP 2002). An eminent translator, writer, and poet whose prolific literary and academic career began in the early 1970s, her translations have included Julio Cortazar, Silvina Ocampo, Clarice Lispector, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Cristina River Garza, Cecilia Vicuña, Jorge Luis Borges, and several books by Manuel Puig, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Severo Sarduy and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Her many honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, several PEN awards--the PEN Center USA’s Translation Award (2012) and the PEN American Gregory Kolovakis Award in Hispanic Letters (1996); the Mellon Fellowship in Women’s Studies (1979), translation grants from the NEA and NEH, and the Rockefeller Residency in Bellagio, Italy. Editor and co-translator of the five-volume series of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry and non-fiction works for Penguin paperback classics (2010), her recent translation of Mexican Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories was shortlisted for the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. Her latest book is Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir (Bloomsbury Press, 2025).