Tiffany Tsao & Gabriella Page-Fort: The Unique World of Author-Translators

Many well-known authors are also translators, and many well-known translators are also writers. How does each activity "enhance" the other (to quote Lydia Davis)? And are there any challenges in being a practitioner of both?

Join author-translator Tiffany Tsao and translator-editor Gabriella Page-Fort as they discuss the synergies and tensions of writing/translating while translating/writing.

Tiffany Tsao is visiting Seattle for the Literary Translator Residency 2026 with the University of Washington Translation Studies Hub, a platform for discussion about the theories, histories, and practice of translation at the University of Washington and in the broader Seattle community. Across its projects, the TS Hub has centered on one core goal: the increase, across the university, of translation literacy—the cultivation of a toolkit that enables the critical foregrounding of the power dynamics, social processes, and linguistic interplay that lie at the core of translation as a cultural enterprise.

Tiffany Tsao’s translations of Indonesian literature have received the PEN Translation Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and a longlisting for the International Booker Prize. She is also the author of The Majesties (2018) and But Won’t I Miss Me (2026), and Deputy Editor at the Sydney Review of Books. (Photo credit: Joy Mei En Lai)

Gabriella Page-Fort is executive editor at HarperOne, publishing nonfiction and fiction with an emphasis on works in translation. Her list includes PEN/Faulkner-longlisted Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj and PEN Translation Award-longlisted The Invisible Sun by Attar, translated from Persian by Sholeh Wolpe. She teaches Publishing Works in Translation at New York University’s School of Professional Studies, handles the book section and zine for Hex Enduction Records & Books in Seattle, and translates from French and Spanish.

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