# Sarah Ruden

Sarah Elizabeth Ruden is an American writer, classics scholar, and translator. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania since 2018. Her publications include poetry, essays, and popularizations of Biblical philology, religious criticism and interpretation.

## Early life

Sarah Ruden was born in Ohio in 1962 and raised in the United Methodist Church. She holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University.
In addition to her academic appointments, Ruden has worked as a medical editor, a contributor to American periodicals, and a stringer for the South African investigative magazine Noseweek.
Ruden became an activist Quaker during her ten years spent in post-apartheid South Africa, where she was a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project. Both before and after her return to the United States in 2005, Ruden has engaged in ecumenical outreach and published a number of articles and essays, in both liberal and conservative publications.

## Career

She was a lecturer in Classics at the University of Cape Town. In 2016, she was awarded a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete her translation of The Confessions of Augustine (2017).
She is an advocate for the popularization of ancient texts.
Ruden has been a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania since 2018.

## Awards

In 2010, Ruden was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to fund her translation of the Oresteia of Aeschylus. She won a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete her translation of The Confessions of Augustine in 2016. Her translation of the Gospels was funded in part by a Robert B. Silvers Grant for Work in Progress in 2019.

## Personal life

Ruden has been a “convinced Friend,” or Quaker convert, since 1992. Her Quakerism informs her translation methodology.

## Books
### Poetry

* Other Places. William Waterman Publications. 1995. (Awarded the 1996 Central News Agency Literary Award)

### Translations

* Petronius (2000). The Satyricon of Petronius: A New Translation with Topical Commentaries (trans.). Hackett. ISBN 9780872205109.
* Aristophanes (2003). Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Translated, with Notes and Topical Commentaries (trans.). Hackett.
* Homer (2005). The Homeric Hymns (trans.). Hackett.
* Virgil (2008). The Aeneid: Vergil (trans.). Yale Univ. Press. Revised and expanded (Yale Univ. Press, 2021).
* Apuleius (2012). The Golden Ass (trans.). Yale Univ. Press.
* Aeschylus (2016). The Oresteia, in The Greek Plays (ed. Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm). Modern Library.
* Augustine (2017). Confessions (trans.). Modern Library.
* Plato (2015). Hippias Minor or The Art of Cunning: A new translation of Plato’s most controversial dialogue (trans.). With introduction and artwork by Paul Chan; essay by Richard Fletcher. Badlands Unlimited and the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art.
* Anonymous (2021). The Gospels (trans.) Modern Library.

### Biblical interpretation

* Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time. Image. 2011.
* The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible. Pantheon. 2017.
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