About the Center for Literary Translation:

The Center for Literary Translation seeks to increase awareness of the art of translation and how it enhances a writer's development and imagination. The CLT sponsors readings, workshops, and conversations with distinguished writer-translators from around the world. Students also participate in events where they can share their own writing and translations and discuss the relationship between the two.

During the 2009-2010 academic year, the CLT will develop a pilot program for MFA students to pursue a course of study in both writing and translation. The curriculum will include workshops, seminars, and master classes that explore the creative act of literary translation and its connection to creative writing.

The Academic Director of the Center is writer and translator Michael Scammell, and the Executive Director is poet and translator Idra Novey.

Michael Scammell, Academic Director

Michael Scammell received his B.A. from Nottingham University in the U.K. in 1958, and a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from Columbia in 1985. He is the author of Solzhenitsyn, A Biography, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the English PEN Nonfiction Prize for best biography of the year in 1984. His authorized biography of Arthur Koestler will be published by Random House in the fall of 2009. He is the editor of The Solzhenitsyn Files, Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union, and Russia's Other Writers, and has translated many books from Russian, including Nabokov's The Defense and The Gift (in collaboration with the author), Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, Childhood, Boyhood and Youth by Tolstoy, and memoirs by Soviet dissidents Anatoly Marchenko and Vladimir Bukovsky. He has also translated short stories and poetry from Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian, including Nothing Is Lost, the Selected Poems of Edvard Kocbek, published by the Princeton University Press in spring 2004. He has written for The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New Republic, and Harper's . He was the founder and first editor (1972-1980) of the London-based Human Rights journal, Index on Censorship, and chaired International PEN's Writers in Prison Committee from 1976-1986. From 1987-1994 he taught Russian Literature and was Chair of the Department of Russian Literature at Cornell University, as well as Director of the Soviet and East European Studies Program, before moving to Columbia to teach nonfiction and translation. He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wilson Center, Columbia University, Harvard University, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the Leverhulme Trust. He is a Vice President of International PEN and a past president (1996-1999) of PEN American Center, and in 2006 co-founded the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia.

Idra Novey, Executive Director

Idra Novey's first collection of poems, The Next Country, received the 2007 Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books and was released in 2008. She's received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Poetry Society of America, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her poems have appeared in Slate, Paris Review, A Public Space, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and in various anthologies. Her translations include the selected poems of Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto, The Clean Shirt of It, published in the Lannan Translation Series with BOA Editions in 2007, the selected poems of Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros, Birds for a Demolition, forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2010, and a novel by the Argentinian writer Vizconde de Lascano Tegui, Elegance of a Man Asleep, forthcoming from Dalkey Archive in 2011.