Emily Wilson (classicist)

Wilson "comes from a long line of academics",[2] including both her parents, A. N. Wilson[3] and Katherine Duncan-Jones,[4] her uncle, and her maternal grandparents, including Elsie Duncan-Jones.[2] Her sister is the food writer Bee Wilson.[5] Wilson's parents divorced shortly before she went to college.[2]

Wilson was "shy but accomplished" in school.[2] A graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1994 (B.A. in literae humaniores, classical literature, and philosophy), she undertook her master's degree in English literature 1500–1660 at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1996), and her Ph.D. (2001) in classical and comparative literature at Yale University.[1]

Wilson's first book, Mocked With Death (2005), grew out of her dissertation and examines mortality in the tragic tradition: "our constant awareness of all that we will lose, are losing, have lost."[2] The work received the Charles Bernheimer Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2003.[1] In 2006, she was named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship (Rome Prize).[6] Her next book, The Death of Socrates (2007), examines Socrates' execution. Wilson later reflected that she was interested in the ways and methods that Socrates would educate people, but also Socrates' death as an image: "What does it mean to live with so much integrity that you can be absolutely yourself at every moment, even when you've just poisoned yourself?"[7]

Wilson's next works primarily focused on Rome's tragic playwright Seneca. In 2010, she translated Seneca's tragedies, with an introduction and notes, in Six Tragedies of Seneca. In 2014 she published The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca. She later noted that Seneca is an interesting subject because "he's so precise in articulating what it means to have a very, very clear vision of the good life and to be completely unable to follow through on living the good life." Wilson chose to translate Seneca's tragedies rather than his prose because translating Seneca's rhetorical style in the prose risks sounding "too silly to be impressive. It has to go very close to sounding silly, but without quite getting there."[7]

Wilson is perhaps best known for her critically acclaimed translation of The Odyssey (2017), becoming the first woman to publish a translation of the work into English. Following a lengthy introduction, she provides a translation of Homer's work in iambic pentameter. Wilson's Odyssey was named by The New York Times as one of its 100 notable books of 2018[8] and it was shortlisted for the 2018 National Translation Award.[9] In 2019, Wilson was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work bringing classical literature to new audiences.[10]

Wilson is a book reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement,[11] the London Review of Books,[12] and The New Republic.[13] She is also the classics editor for The Norton Anthology of World Literature and The Norton Anthology of Western Literature.[14][15]

In January 2020, Wilson joined the Booker Prize judging panel, alongside Margaret Busby (chair), Lee Child, Sameer Rahim and Lemn Sissay.[16]