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Álvaro Mutis (1923-2013), born in Bogotá, Colombia, was the author of poetry, short stories, and novels. As a child he lived in Brussels, returning to Bogotá to complete his education, and then moved to Mexico in 1956. His first poems were published in 1948, his first short stories in 1978, and his first novella, The Snow of the Admiral-the initial volume of the Maqroll series -in 1986. NYRB Classics publishes the complete Maqroll series in The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Mutis received many literary awards, including the 1989 Prix Medicis and the 2002 Neustadt Prize for Literature.
Kristin Dykstra's translations include books by Reina María Rodríguez, Ángel Escobar, Juan Carlos Flores, Omar Pérez, and Marcelo Morales. She is co-editor of Materia Prima, an anthology dedicated to Amanda Berenguer. Previously Dykstra co-edited Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. She lives in Vermont.
Alastair Reid (1926 -2014) was a poet, prose chronicler, translator, and traveler. Born in Scotland, he came to the United States in the early 1950s, began publishing his poems in The New Yorker in 1951, and for the next fifty-odd years was a traveling correspondent for that magazine. Having lived in both Spain and Latin America for long spells, he was a constant translator of poetry from the Spanish language, in particular the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. He published more than forty books, among them two word books for children, Ounce Dice Trice, with drawings by Ben Shahn, and Supposing..., with drawings by Bob Gill, both available from The New York Review Children's Collection.
Edith Grossman is an award-winning translator of poetry and prose by leading contemporary Spanish-language writers, including Garbiel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos, and, of course, Álvaro Mutis. Her translation of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote of La Mancha is one of the finest in the English language and in 2006 she was awarded the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation. She lives in New York City. |