Joel Agee

Class of Fall 2008

Writer and Translator

New York

PIRA, a novel in progress

While at the Academy, Agee was working on a novel, tentatively titled “PIRA.” It is the story of a young boy living in Mexico in the mid-1940s with his expatriate German stepfather, his American mother, and a live-in Mexican maid, told from the child’s point of view.

Joel Agee is the author of two memoirs, Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany (Chicago, 2000), and In The House Of My Fear (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006). His essays have appeared in Harper’s, New Yorker, Yale Review, and other magazines. His translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea and Hans Erich Nossack’s Der Untergang won the 1999 Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and the 2005 Lois Roth Prize of the Modern Language Association, respectively. In 2007 he was a finalist for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and received the Alta National Translation for his translation of the Selected Writings of Friedrich Dürrenmatt. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.