Jennifer Croft

Jennifer Croft is an American author, critic and translator who translates works from Polish, Ukrainian and Argentine Spanish. With the author Olga Tokarczuk, she was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights. In 2020, she was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for Homesick, which was originally written in Spanish in 2014 and was published in Argentina under its original title, Serpientes y escaleras.

Croft is the recipient of Guggenheim, Cullman, Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, Fondation Jan Michalski, Yaddo, and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation and a Tin House Workshop Scholarship for Homesick. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa.

She is a founding editor of The Buenos Aires Review and has published her own work and numerous translations in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, n+1, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, BOMB, Guernica, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribune, Granta, and elsewhere.

Croft translated Romina Paula's August (The Feminist Press, 2017), Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery (Charco Press, 2021), Pedro Mairal's The Woman from Uruguay (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), Tina Oziewicz's What Feelings Do When No One's Looking (Elsewhere Editions, 2022), Sylvia Molloy's Dislocations (Charco Press, 2022), and Sebastián Martínez Daniell's Two Sherpas (Charco Press, 2023). Her translation of Tokarczuk's Flights from Polish was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in May 2017. Croft has also translated Tokarczuk's novel Księgi Jakubowe (The Books of Jacob), which won the Nike Award in 2015.

Croft has written about postcards, translation and exile, contemporary American fiction, and Tempelhof Airport. From 2021 to 2022 she was a Visiting assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas. As of 2023, she is a Presidential Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa.

With her essay in The Guardian, "Why translators should be named on book covers," Croft launched the #TranslatorsOnTheCover campaign in cooperation with the Society of Authors and the author Mark Haddon. The campaign has raised awareness of the collaborative nature of translated literature by foregrounding the identity of the translator, who, Croft argues, is the person who writes every word of the translated work.