Eva Hoffman

Eva Hoffman (born Ewa Wydra on 1 July 1945) is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning writer and academic.

Early life and education Eva Hoffman was born in Kraków, Poland, shortly after World War II. Her parents, Boris and Maria Wydra, survived the Holocaust by hiding in a forest bunker and then by being hidden by Polish and Ukrainian neighbours. In 1959, at the age of 13, she emigrated with her parents and sister to Vancouver, British Columbia. Upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship and studied English literature at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the Yale School of Music, and Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard in English and American literature in 1975.

In 1990, she received the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1992, the Guggenheim Fellowship for General Nonfiction, as well as the Whiting Award. In 2000, Eva Hoffman was the Year 2000 Una Lecturer at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, she was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Warwick.

She has written and presented programmes for BBC Radio, and is the recipient of the Prix Italia for a radio work combining text and music. She has lectured internationally on subjects of exile, historical memory, human rights and other contemporary issues. Her work has been translated internationally, and she was awarded an honorary DLitt from Warwick University in 2008. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is currently a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies at University College, London.

In her 1989 memoir, Lost in Translation, Hoffman tells the story of her experience immigrating to America from a post-World War II Poland.

Family She married Barry Hoffman, a fellow Harvard student, in 1971. The couple divorced in 1976.