August is a lot of things: it’s uncomfortably hot, it’s National Panini Month and it’s somehow already time for your kids to go back to school.
But August s also Women in Translation Month, a yearly celebration of books by women written in languages other than English. And any celebration that involves the reading of books is one I engage with — possibly while enjoying a cool drink and a warm panino after the kids head off to school.
To talk more about it, I reached out to Jennifer Croft, the award-winning author and translator of writers such as Nobel Prize-winning Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, with whom she shared the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Croft has translated works from Polish, Ukrainian and Argentine Spanish.
Croft is also the author of the memoir “Homesick” and the novel “The Extinction of Irena Rey,” which was published earlier this year, and she spoke by phone from her home in Oklahoma where she is the Presidential Professor of English & Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa. (Croft, by the way, first enrolled as a student at the university when she was 15.)