Susan Bernofsky

Susan Bernofsky is an author and American translator of German-language literature. She has translated more than twenty books including works by the Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser. She is also the author of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale, 2021), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Other works of translation include Franz Kafka’sThe Metamorphosis, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, and the novels and poetry of Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Uljana Wolf, and others. Her translations have earned numerous awards including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the inaugural Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize, and the Friedrich Ulfers Prize. She is Professor of Writing in the Faculty of the Arts, and Director of Literary Translation at Columbia in the School of the Arts Writing Program.