Natasha Wimmer

Natasha Wimmer (born 1973[1]) is an American translator best known for her translations of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and The Savage Detectives from Spanish into English.[2]

Wimmer learned Spanish in Spain, where she spent four years growing up. She studied Spanish literature at Harvard.[2] After graduating her first job was at Farrar, Straus & Giroux from 1996 to 1999 as an assistant and then managing editor.[1] While there her first translation was Dirty Havana Trilogy by the Cuban novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.[2]

She then worked at Publishers Weekly, before the demands on working on Bolaño's books became full-time.[1] "My reason for going into publishing in the first place was that I had decided in college that I would never be a fiction writer, but I knew I wanted to be as close to books as I could. Publishing was one way, and translating turned out to be a better way for me."[1]

She has also translated Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa's The Language of Passion, The Way to Paradise, and Letters to a Young Novelist; and Marcos Giralt Torrente's Father and Son.

Wimmer received the PEN Translation Prize in 2009.