About

Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from the Arabic and Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Her work has been shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize, longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, and supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and several English PEN Translates Awards.

Elisabeth's published translations include The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz (Melville House, 2016) and The Apartment in Bab el-Louk by Donia Maher, illustrated by Ganzeer and Ahmed Nady (Darf Publishers, 2018). Upcoming book-length translations include Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun (Comma Press, 2019) and The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous (Harvill Secker/Knopf, 2020).

Elisabeth has taught translation at Hunter College CUNY, and will be an instructor at Bread Loaf Translators' Conference in 2019. She has a MA from Columbia University, a BA from Swarthmore College, and was a CASA Fellow at the American University in Cairo. She is also a member of the translators' collective Cedilla & Co, and a judge for the 2019 National Book Award in Translated Literature.

Featured Work

Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun

2019

Winner of a 2017 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and a 2018 English PEN Translates Award

'These stories—possibly the first collection by a Sudanese woman to be fully translated into English—offer an emotionally intimate look at urban life and alienation, while demonstrating an impressive range of literary styles, from realist to reality-bending.' - Judges’ citation for the 2017 PEN/Heim Translation Fund

‘A stunning collection, remarkable for its sweet clarity of voice and startling depictions of the marginalised and the destitute. With mastery, Rania Mamoun reaches straight into the heartbeat of her subject matter, laying bare humanity in all its tenderness and tenacity.’ – Leila Aboulela, author of Elsewhere Home

Other Works

  • The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz

    2016