Tess Lewis
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Freelance writer and translator

Berlin Prize Fellow - Class of Spring 2022

Tess Lewis is a writer and translator for French and German. She completed a BA at the University of Notre Dame and MA at the University of Oxford. She is co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee, a fellow at New York University’s Institute for the Humanities, and an advisory editor for the Hudson Review. Since 2019 (and in 2014-15), Lewis has curated the Festival Neue Literatur, New York City’s annual celebration of German-language literature in English. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Lutz Seiler, Pascal Bruckner, and Christine Angot. Her work has been supported by PEN USA and PEN UK, a Max Geilinger Translation Grant (for her translation of Philippe Jaccottet), the ACFNY Translation Prize and 2017 PEN Translation Prize (for her translation of the novel Angel of Oblivion by Austrian writer Maja Haderlap), and by the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment of the Arts. Lewis’s essays and reviews have appeared in publications including the Partisan Review, Salmagundi, Hudson Review, World Literature Today, Wall Street Journal, American Scholar, and Bookforum, among others.

Project Description

A translation of Lutz Seiler’s novel Stern 111

At the Academy, Lewis will continue work on her translation of Lutz Seiler’s 2020 Leipzig Award-winning novel, Star 111 (Suhrkamp), which portrays the collision of multiple personal, political, and economic interests over the months following the fall of the Wall, in November 1989. A prominent German poet, Seiler established himself as major novelist with his 2014 debut, Kruso (Suhrkamp), which won the 2014 German Book Prize, Uwe Johnson Prize, and Marie Luise Kaschnitz Prize. Lewis’ translation of Kruso (Scribe UK, 2019) won an English PEN Award and was runner-up for the 2018 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. In Kruso, set in the summer of 1989 on the Baltic island of Hiddensee, Seiler mirrors the downfall of the GDR through the dissolution of a group of outcasts and idealists making their own bids for freedom. Star 111 dovetails with Kruso, portraying East Berlin’s underground bar- and squatter scenes between November 1989 and German unification, on October 3, 1990. These were months teeming with possibility for social and economic systems other than socialism or capitalism. “Seiler’s second novel explores a number of timely and urgent questions,” Lewis writes, including “how one establishes an authentic, independent existence against the pull of powerful, seductive political and ideological currents.” Commissioned by the London/New York publisher And Other Stories, Lewis’s translation of Star 111 will be published in summer 2023.

Academy Activities

03 Mar 22
The Art of Betrayal: Translation in an Age of Suspicion Literary Translation

American Academy Lecture

The Art of Betrayal: Translation in an Age of Suspicion

In this talk, Tess Lewis, a translator of French and German, will discuss the contested idea of fidelity to the original text.

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16 Feb 22

Fellow Spotlight: Tess Lewis

Tess Lewis is a freelance writer and translator. Her Academy project is the translation of Lutz Seiler’s novel Stern 111. ...

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03 Mar 22

The Art of Betrayal: Translation in an Age of Suspicion

Can translation, as an act of responsiveness and responsibility, create common ground when relations between and within societies are increasingly fraught? By resisting the pressure to smooth out differences between cultures and by complicating our ideas of the universal, translation paradoxically m ...

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