Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator and editor in New York City. Her translation of The Briefcase by Hiromi Kawakami was nominated for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize, and the UK edition (Strange Weather in Tokyo) was nominated for the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She has also translated works by Osamu Dazai and Fuminori Nakamura, among others.
Allison Powell
Articles by Allison Powell
Thursday July 6
Four Questions for Simon Armitage, Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
For the first time in my life I was bilingual, even if I could only communicate with people who had been dead for half a millennium.
Thursday July 6
Four Questions for Tess Lewis, Winner of the 2017 PEN Translation Prize
I always read my drafts out loud when I’m polishing them—I find it easier to hear mistakes or awkward passages than to ‘see’ them.
Thursday April 7
Four Questions for Sawako Nakayasu, Winner of the 2016 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
“The Sagawa book presented a special challenge, which was that the Modernist sensibility and language, especially in this particular Japanese context, was unlike anything I had ever seen, and had no immediate parallel in English-language literature.”