Susan Bernofsky

Susan Bernofsky (born 1966) is an American translator of German-language literature and author. She is best known for bringing the Swiss writer Robert Walser to the attention of the English-speaking world (in a "second wave" after the work of Christopher Middleton), translating many of his books and writing his biography. She has also translated several books by Jenny Erpenbeck and Yoko Tawada. Her prizes for translation include the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, the 2012 Calw Hermann Hesse Prize, the 2015 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the 2015 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. She was also selected for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. In 2017 she won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her translation of ''Memoirs of a Polar Bear'' by Yoko Tawada. In 2018 she was awarded the MLA's Lois Roth Award for her translation of ''Go, Went, Gone'' by Jenny Erpenbeck. In 2024, Bernofsky was reported to be working on a translation of Thomas Mann's ''The Magic Mountain''.

She teaches at Columbia University. In April 2024, she was one of 23 Jewish professors at Columbia (including six Barnard College professors) to sign an open letter to Columbia president Minouche Shafik, calling congressional investigations of antisemitism on university campuses "a new McCarthyism" intended "to rehearse and amplify decades-long bad-faith efforts to undermine universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production" and alleging a widespread effort to silence "Palestinian narratives and analyses on campus." The letter she signed declared that "today’s attacks on the university [because of alleged climate hostile to Jewish and Israeli students] are not truly about antisemitism." A shorter version of this letter was published in the Columbia Daily Spectator. Provided by Wikipedia