Clare Cavanagh

Scholar and translator Clare Cavanagh is the author of Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (2010), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Other works of scholarship include Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (1995), which received the AATSEEL Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book in Slavic Literature. She is currently working on the authorized biography of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Her interests in contemporary Slavic languages and poetics led her, as a graduate student at Harvard, to Polish literature. She is now one of the preeminent translators of contemporary Polish poetry, and has translated numerous collections from poets including Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski. Cavanagh's many awards for translation include the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation, and the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for Outstanding Literary Translation. Her translation of Wislawa Szymborska’s latest volume, Here (2010), won the Found in Translation Award.

Cavanagh has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her criticism and reviews have been widely published in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, Poetry, and the New York Review of Books, among others. She is Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University.