Tess Lewis

Teresa D. Lewis is an American writer, essayist and literary translator from French and German. Her translation of Austrian poet and novelist Maja Haderlap's novel Angel of Oblivion was awarded the 2017 PEN Translation Prize, the Austrian Cultural Forum NY Translation Prize, and was nominated for the BTBA. She has also translated works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, and Philippe Jaccottet. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and received the Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, New College, in 1986.

Career Lewis is an essayist and translator. Her essays, primarily about European literature, have been published in The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, World Literature Today, The American Scholar, and Bookforum. She is an advisory editor for The Hudson Review, and is also a board member for the National Books Critics Circle. and has translated works by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Alois Hotschnig, Melinda Nadj Abonji, Julya Rabinowich, Lukas Bärfuss, Philippe Jaccottet, Jean-Luc Benoziglio, Pascal Bruckner, Maja Haderlap, Peter Handke, Christine Angot, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, and Anselm Kiefer. In 2017, she published an English translation of Christine Angot's novel, Incest. Her translation was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award. In a review in the New Yorker, critic H. C. Wilentz praised Lewis's translation, noting the challenges raised by Angot's "antagonism towards conventional syntax," which made Lewis's translation "a feat of perspicuity". In Asymptote Journal, Tsipi Keller praised Lewis's translation as well, stating that "it feels as though Angot, so very French, is speaking to us directly in English." In 2015 she received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to support her translation of Swiss writer Ludwig Hohl’s Notizen, a book consisting of Hohl's notes, journal entries, and reflections.

Translated works (2008) Peter Handke, Once Again for Thucydides (German to English, New Directions) (2012) Lukas Bärfuss, One hundred days (German to English, London : Granta) (2011) Alois Hotschnig, Ludwig’s Room (German to English, Seagull Books) (2013) Philippe Jaccottet, Seedtime: Notebooks 1954-79 (French to English, Seagull Books) (2014) Doron Rabinovici, Elsewhere (German to English, London : Haus Publishing Ltd) (2014) Melinda Nadj Abonji, Fly Away, Pigeon (German to English, Seagull Books) (2015) Philippe Jaccottet, Obscurity (London; New York; Calcutta : Seagull Books) (2015) Anselm Kiefer, Notebooks : Volume 1: 1998-1999 (German to English, Seagull Books) (2016) Maja Haderlap: Angel of Oblivion (German to English, Brooklyn, NY : Archipelago Books) (2017) Christine Angot, Incest (French to English, Brooklyn, NY : Archipelago Books) (2017) Lutz Seiler, Kruso (German to English, Scribe Publications) (2017) Klaus Merz, Stigmata of Bliss Three Novellas (German to English, Seagull Books) (2018) Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Panopticon (Seagull Books) (2018) Monique Schwitter; One another : a novel (German to English, New York, NY : Persea Books) (2019) Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays (German to English, New York, NY : New York Review of Books) (2019) Michel Layaz, My Mother's Tears (French to English, Seagull Books) (2020) Jonas Lüscher, Kraft (German to English, New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux) (2021) Mariana Leky, What you can see from here (German to English, New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux) (2021) Ludwig Hohl, The Notes: On Non-premature Reconciliation, Foreword by Joshua Cohen (German to English, New Haven: Yale University Press) (2022) Maja Haderlap, distant transit (German to English, Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books) (2022) Anselm Kiefer, , Anselm Kiefer in Conversation with Klaus Dermutz (German to English, Seagull Books) (2022) Anne Weber, Epic Annette: A Heroine's Tale (French and German to English, London: The Indigo Press) (2023) Ernst Jünger, On the Marble Cliffs (German to English, New York, NY: New York Review of Books) (2023) Judith Keller, The Questionable Ones (German to English (Seagull Books)

Awards and honors 2009 – PEN Translation Fund Grand for translation of Alois Hotschnig's short stories 2018 – Nominated for the Best Translated Book Award, for translating Christine Angot's Incest 2021 – PEN UK Translates! award for Anne Weber’s novel in verse Epic Annette 2022 – Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (USA) for a translation of In the Forest of the Metropoles by Karl-Markus Gauß 2022 – Berlin Prize Fellow, American Academy in Berlin 2022 – National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship for Karl-Markus Gauß’s essays 2022 – PEN UK Translates! award for Lutz Seiler’s novel Star 111