The Intimate Worlds of Colette 1/25/2023
Channel: Mechanics' Institute
Date: 07/02/2023

Mechanics' Institute's three day celebration of the 150th birthday of France's most famous and provocative woman writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) included an online panel with internationally known translators and biographers. Judith Thurman, Zack Rogow, and Paul Eprile. 

Paul Eprile is a publisher, poet, and translator. He was a co-winner of the 2018 Annual Translation Prize of the French-American Foundation for his translation of Jean Giono’s Melville, which was published by NYRB Classics. He lives on the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario, Canada.

Judith Thurman is the author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette and of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the National Book Award for Biography in 1983. She is a widely published literary critic, cultural journalist, and translator of poetry.

Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books or plays. His translations of French literature include two books by Colette, Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island and Other Previously Untranslated Gems, co-translated with Renée Morel; and the novel Green Wheat, short-listed for the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize. Rogow coauthored the play Colette Uncensored, which had its first staged reading at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and ran in London, Catalonia, San Francisco, and Portland, and was included in the Fête de Colette on Thursday night. He has received the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his co-translation of Earthlight by André Breton, and the Northern California Book Reviewers Award in Translation for his English version of George Sand’s novel Horace.