Susan Bernofsky

A much-lauded translator of modernist and contemporary German-language literature, Sen. Susan Bernofsky holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her many translations include three novels and four collections of short prose by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. She is the author, most recently, of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale, 2021), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. She is a Berlin Prize, Cullman Center, and Guggenheim fellow. Past awards include the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, the Modern Language Association's Lois Roth Award, and the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize. Her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel The End of Days (2014) won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Yoko Tawada's novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016) won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Her most recent published translation is Tawada's novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (2024). She has recently completed a new translation of Thomas Mann's monumental novel The Magic Mountain, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in early 2027.