About
Zoë Perry works primarily with the translation, scouting and promotion of contemporary Brazilian literary fiction and creative non-fiction. She has translated works by several award-winning Portuguese-language authors including Veronica Stigger, Emilio Fraia, Ana Paula Maia, Clara Drummond, Juliana Leite, Vanessa Barbara, Rodrigo de Souza Leão, Carol Bensimon, and Lourenço Mutarelli. Her translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Astra, n+1, The Paris Review, Granta, Words Without Borders and the White Review, among others. Zoë was selected for a residency at the Banff International Translation Centre for her translation of Emilio Fraia’s Sevastopol, published by New Directions (US) and Lolli Editions (UK). In 2015 she was the first translator-in-residence at the FLIP international literary festival in Paraty, Brazil, and was awarded a PEN/Heim grant for her translation of Opisanie świata by Veronica Stigger, whose work she has been translating for over ten years.
Featured Work
Sevastopol
by Emilio Fraia
Translated by Zoë Perry
Three subtly connected stories converge in this chimerical debut, each burrowing into a turning point in a person’s life: a young woman gives a melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a musty, semi-abandoned inn in the haunted depths of the Brazilian countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play about the city of Sevastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean War soldiers.
Inspired by Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches, Emilio Fraia masterfully weaves together these stories of yearning and loss, obsession and madness, failure and the desire to persist, in a restrained manner reminiscent of Anton Chekhov, Roberto Bolaño, and Rachel Cusk.
https://www.ndbooks.com/book/sevastopol/
Other Works
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of inaugural Cercador Prize for my translation of Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia
