Susan Bernofsky

Sen. Susan Bernofsky 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. On the University Senate, Sen. Bernofsky serves on the Rules of University Conduct Committee. 

A 2020 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, 2019 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and past Guggenheim fellow, Sen. Bernofsky has translated more than twenty books including 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. Past awards include the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize 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. In 2019 she received the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award and the Friedrich Ulfers Prize. Her translation of Yoko Tawada’s novel Paul Celan and the Transtibetan Angel is forthcoming in 2023 from New Directions. She is currently working on a new translation of Thomas Mann’s monumental novel The Magic Mountain for W.W. Norton.