Discipline: Literature – translation

Natasha Wimmer

Discipline: Literature – translation
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2002

Natasha Wimmer is an American translator best known for her translations of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and The Savage Detectives from Spanish into English. Wimmer learned Spanish in Spain, where she spent four years growing up. She studied Spanish literature at Harvard. After graduating, her first job was at Farrar, Straus & Giroux from 1996 to 1999 as an assistant and then managing editor. While there her first translation was Dirty Havana Trilogy by the Cuban novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. She then worked at Publishers Weekly, before the demands of working on Bolaño's books became full-time. She has also translated Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa's The Language of Passion, The Way to Paradise, and Letters to a Young Novelist; and Marcos Giralt Torrente's Father and Son. Wimmer received the PEN Translation Prize in 2009.

At MacDowell in 2002, Natasha was completing a translation of a collection of literary and political essays by Mario Vargas Llosa, The Language of Passion: Selected Commentary (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2004).

Studios

Heyward

Natasha Wimmer worked in the Heyward studio.

The Lodge Annex, a wing on the west side of the men’s dormitory (The Lodge), was completed in 1926. Initially intended as an apartment for a caretaker, the space was soon repurposed as a live-in studio for writers. In recognition of a major endowment gift from the DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Foundation, Lodge Annex was…

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