Na Zhong was born and raised in Chengdu and is currently studying creative writing in New York. The verbs she uses to describe her life are: write, laugh, translate, read, cry, sleep, cook, listen. She has published fiction and nonfiction in Chinese and is translating Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends into Chinese.
Eric M. B. Becker is editor of Words without Borders and an award-winning literary translator from the Portuguese. He has earned fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Commission, PEN America, and the Louis Armstrong House Museum. In 2019, his translation of Mia Couto's Rain and Other Stories received honorable mention from the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, and his translation of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida's That Hair (Tin House 2020) is a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize. He is a cofounder of the transatlantic Pessoa Festival. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Freeman's, and other publications.
Angela Rodel is a professional literary translator living and working in Bulgaria. She holds a BA from Yale and an MA from UCLA in linguistics. She received a 2014 NEA translation grant for Georgi Gospodinov’s novel The Physics of Sorrow, as well as a 2010 PEN Translation Fund grant for Georgi Tenev’s short-story collection Holy Light. Her translations of Milen Ruskov’s Thrown into Nature (2011), Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray (2013) and Angel Igov’s A Short Tale of Shame (2013) have been published by Open Letter Books. The UK publishing house Istros Books published her translation of Virginia Zaharieva’s novel Nine Rabbits in 2012; it was rereleased by Black Balloon in the US in 2014.
Elizabeth Bryer is a translator and writer from Australia. She translated Claudia Salazar Jiménez’s Blood of the Dawn (Deep Vellum 2016) and is a 2017 recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant to translate Aleksandra Lun’s Los palimpsestos. Her translation of Melba Escobar’s House of Beauty will be published in March 2018 by Fourth Estate.