Jennifer Croft Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of JenniferCroft Non-Fiction Books

Jennifer Croft is an American writer, translator, and critic who has translated different books that have been written in Ukrainian, Polish, and Argentine Spanish.

She was given the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for the work that she did translating flights with author Olga Tokarczuk. She received the William Saroyan International Prize in 2020 for writing for Homesick, a memoir.

Jennifer grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She went to higher education at an early age, being only fifteen years old when she first attended the University of Tulsa. She would graduate with her BA from the University of Tulsa in 2001. There she would go the University of Iowa, studying Polish and completing an MFA in literary translation. Croft also attended Northwestern University, graduating with a PhD in comparative literary studies.

The author resided in Warsaw, Poland on a Fullbright scholarship for a period of two years. She mentioned in an interview that Polish has served in the past as a professional and academic connection, and she goes to Warsaw or Krakow once a year at least to keep that connection intact. She would meet Olga Tokarczuk while she was in Warsaw and would go on to collaborate with her on Flights.

Croft was a founding editor of the publication The Buenos Aires Review. Her work and translations have been published in such media as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, VICE, Electric Literature, BOMB, Lit Hub, n+1, Guernica, The New Republic, Granta, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and more.

It was in Argentina in Buenos Aires where Jennifer Croft first learned Spanish. She says that when it comes to translating works of Argentine Spanish, she will translate only the works that were composed by Argentine authors. Croft says that she’s felt it’s important to be familiar with many aspects of the components of speech and find a good rendition in English.

Croft has translated many different works, including August by Romina Paula, A Perfect Cemetery by Federico Falco, The Woman from Uruguay by Pedro Mairal, What Feelings Do When No One’s Looking from Tina Oziewicz, Dislocations by Sylvia Molloy, and Two Sherpas by Sebastian Martinez Daniell. Her translation of The Books of Jacob in 2015 won her the Nike Award.

She has also written about a variety of topics herself and worked in different creative fields. She was a visiting assistant professor of creative writing from 2021-2022 for the University of Arkansas and served as Presidential Professor of Creative Writing for the University of Tulsa.

Croft also helped to launch a #TranslatorsOnTheCover campaign with the help of an essay that was published in The Guardian talking about her thoughts on why translators should be on book covers by name. She launched the campaign along with Mark Haddon, an author, and the Society of Authors.

The first novel to come out solo from Jennifer Croft was her 2024 novel The Extinction of Irena Rey. The book was well-received, with Publishers Weekly writing that the author serves up a mystery that is ‘wickedly funny’ centered around a famous author and the translators that work on her writing. The book was first started through inspiration when Croft visited to the Bialowieza Forest in 2017.

The author has received many grants and fellowships, receiving also the Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation. She also won a Tin House Workshop Scholarship for Homesick. Croft was the recipient of the Man Booker International Prize along with Olga Tokarczuk in 2018.

Croft has said that she first experienced Olga’s work when finding Playing Many Drums, her short-story collection, in 2003. She immediately enjoyed the style of the author, but also appreciated her psychological acuity and ability to distill her character’s essence. Croft says that Flights was referred to as a constellation novel by Tokarczuk, which means many different stories, ideas, and voices are part of the novel. The translation process was ‘challenging’ and ‘delightful’ for the author, since she was able to move into a new subject every moment that she was at the computer and really enjoyed translating the book.

Croft’s translation of The Books of Jacob made the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2022. She also received the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for the memoir Homesick in 2020. The book was composed in Spanish originally. The author got a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022 for her own debut novel. “Anaheim”, a short story by the author, earned a nomination for a Pushcart Prize in 2023. She also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 2023 for literature.

The Extinction of Irena Rey is the debut novel from author and translator Jennifer Croft. It was first released in 2024. This is the fascinating story about a group of eight translators that decide to embark on a search to find a famous author that has gone missing in an old Polish forest.

When a group of translators come to a house in the forest located on the Belarus border, they know that it is the property of Irena Rey. Rey is a famous author and the translators are there to sit down and work on Gray Eminence, the magnum opus of the author. The only problem is that a few days after they have arrived, the author goes missing without any clues as to what happened.

The translators all come from different places, hailing from eight individual countries. They may have different backgrounds, but they all appear to really respect and admire the author. It is no surprise then that they decide that they must go into the forest and look for the writer, searching for clues to where she could have gone. This whole time, they will also start translating her master work.

The group go through the old wooded forest, witnessing everything from lichens to slime molds, looking through her things and her texts to find clues. They were not prepared to also find different secrets and deceptions of the authors that they were not ready for at all.

As the translators become even more paranoid, they soon find that they become caught up in differences and rivalries that may end up taking priority over the hunt for the author. Will they be able to find her in time, or at all? Read this fascinating fictional debut from Jennifer Croft to find out!