LiteraryTranslation Mini-Conference 2016

PRESENTER BIOS

Ruth Achlama was born and raised in Germany and studied law at the University of Heidelberg followed by Judaica studies at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. She moved to Israel in 1974 and since 1981 has been translating Hebrew works into German by Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, Meir Shalev, S. Yizhar, Yoram Kaniuk, David Vogel, Ronit Matalon, Ayelet GundarGoshen and others. She was a recipient of the two-year Hieronymus Ring of the German Translators Union (1993-5); the Paul Celan Prize, mostly for her translations of books by Amos Oz (1995); and in 2015 was awarded the German-Hebrew Translation Prize of Germany and Israel for her translations of 1948 by Yoram Kaniuk and A Viennese Romance by David Vogel.

Evan Fallenberg is author of the novels Light Fell and When We Danced on Water and translator of works by Meir Shalev, Yair Lapid, Adir Miller and others. He is coordinator of fiction and literary translation in the Department of English Literature at Bar-Ilan and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at City University of Hong Kong. His novels and translations have been awarded many prizes and he is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (USA), the MacDowell Colony (USA) and Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt (Switzerland). He is also the founder and artistic director of Arabesque: An Arts & Residency Center in Old Acre and chair of the Translation Residency Program at Mishkenot Shaananim, Jerusalem.

Daniel Feldman is an assistant professor of English at Bar-Ilan University, where he specializes in Holocaust literature and young adult fiction of the Holocaust. He is currently writing a manuscript on the use of play in young adult literature of the Holocaust. A graduate of Columbia and Yale universities, with a PhD in comparative literature from Yale, he is the recipient of an Israel Science Foundation grant, a Bar-Ilan Faculty Grant, a Children’s Literature Association Faculty Research Grant and a Ford Foundation grant, and was named an Outstanding Lecturer of Bar-Ilan University in 2013.

Mitch Ginsburg, a graduate of Bar-Ilan University's creative writing program, has reported for the Wall Street Journal and The Providence Journal and served as a staff writer for the Jerusalem Report and The Times of Israel. A former military correspondent, he has translated several works of fiction, including The World of the End by Ofir Touche Gafla, Thera by Zeruya Shalev, and Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua, as well as non-fiction books that include two biographies of Ariel Sharon and one work on the Israeli response to the Munich Olympics massacre. An editor at the Ilanot Review, he has published several works of his own fiction, most recently with Tablet Magazine, and is hoping to complete a novel during the coming year.

The son of an antiquarian book dealer, Ziv Lewis’s career in publishing began as a literary agent in 1982 at Pikarski Ltd. In 2002, when two of Israel's largest trade publishers merged, Lewis became the Foreign Rights Manager/Acquisitions Editor for Kinneret Zmora Bitan Dvir Publishing. KZBD currently publishes some 300 new titles a year of which over half are translations and the company is also a partner in the Tsomet Sefarim chain of 80 bookstores throughout Israel. Aiming for cultural diversity and pluralism, Lewis is responsible for worldwide scouting operations and has been instrumental in selling Israeli writers like Liad Shoham and Haim Shapiro abroad as well as in acquiring a very international list that includes works in translation by Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, Gunther Grass, Dave Eggers, John Le Carre, Jiang Rong, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, Nassim Taleb, Malcolm Gladwell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Margaret Mazzantini and Aleksander Hemon. 

Inga Michaeli has translated into Hebrew over 220 titles – fiction, non-fiction and lots of DK and LP travel guides – as well as many hours of movies and TV shows, academic articles and marketing texts in need of some oomph. Her translations include The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, The Known World by Edward P. Jones (Pulitzer Prize for fiction 2004), March by Geraldine Brooks (Pulitzer Prize for fiction 2006), Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, and a new translation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Two of her latest translations are The Boy by Lara Santoro and Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale. She is currently working on a new translation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Michaeli is a former chair of the Israel Translators Association, has taught subtitling, literary translation and creative non-fiction translation at Beit Berl College and is a regular speaker at conferences in Israel and abroad. Her main field of expertise (and true passion) is tourism and travel – she translates (English<>Hebrew) for major airlines, hotel chains and booking sites, and is regularly featured in Hebrew travel magazines (Masa Acher) and newspapers (Globes), as well as English-language travel mags. Recently she launched Wander Words – Writing the Globe (website coming soon).

Abed Natour studied cinema directing at Camera Obscura, Tel Aviv, and has been involved in the production of many films for Israeli, French and American production companies. In 2002 he translated the Israeli film The Band’s Visit and he regularly teaches cinema workshops for Jewish and Arab youth. An expert in the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Natour served as dramaturg for Eyes, a theatrical musical journey based on Darwish’s poetry directed by Norman Issa and staged at the Arab-Jewish Theater of Jaffa, where Natour also serves as a supervisor. Recently, he was employed as a dialogue coach for A.K.A. Nadia, a new film by Tova Asher. He is presently developing a filmscript of his own.

A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars Program, where she doublemajored in poetry and non-fiction writing, Rena Rossner is a literary and foreign rights agent for the Deborah Harris Literary Agency. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin and holds an MA in History from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She worked at bookstores in four countries, has written extensively for The Jerusalem Report and The Jerusalem Post, and worked in PR, grant-writing, and website development at The Jerusalem Foundation. She is a writer of both fiction and poetry as well as the author of the cookbook Eating the Bible, which has been translated into five languages.

Moshe Sakal is the author of four Hebrew novels also published in French translation, with English translation forthcoming. In 2011, Sakal’s novel Yolanda was shortlisted for the Sapir Prize and was published in France in 2012 by Stock publishing house. Sakal has been awarded the title of Honorary Fellow in Writing by the University of Iowa, USA; the Eshkol prize; and a Fulbright grant. He has published essays and opinion pieces in several major Israeli outlets (including Haaretz), as well as in Le Monde (France) and The Forward (USA). His most recent novel, The Diamond Setter, was published in May 2014. He currently heads the translation unit of the Literary Division of the Israeli Center for Books and Libraries. www.moshesakal.com