Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer and translator who works from Serbo-Croatian or Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian (BCMS) into English. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis and an MPhil in comparative literature from Trinity College Dublin. Her research on multilingualism and the racialization of language brings a relational approach to the study of contemporary North American and Southeast European literatures. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PMLA, Slavic and East European Journal, Journal of Literary Multilingualism, Asymptote, World Literature Today, Boulevard, Reading in Translation, and Balkanist. In 2020, she was awarded the American Literary Translators Association Travel Fellowship. In 2021-22 she was an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow and Associate Research Scholar in the Program in American Studies and in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. She received a 2023 Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate Đurđa Knežević's novel Vanilla Ice Cream.
TRANSLATIONS
Cloud the Color Skin, a novel by Nebojša Lujanović, forthcoming Fall 2023.
"Unending," a short story by Maša Kolanović, Asymptote, July 2021.
"Regarding the Father," a short story by Vladimir Arsenijević, Belgrade Noir, Akashic Books, 2020.
SEEKING A PUBLISHER
Underground Barbie, a novel by Maša Kolanović.
Dear Pests and Other Chilling Stories, a short story collection by Maša Kolanović (with Vlad Beronja).
Vanilla Ice Cream, a novel by Đurđa Knežević.
ESSAYS
"Counting Change." Women Write the Balkans, January 2023.
"Balkan, Creole, Other: Dislocating Contemporary Multilingualisms." Journal of Literary Multilingualism, forthcoming Spring 2023.
"Postcolonial Encounters in the Other Europe: Linguistic Racialization in a Born-Translated Sarajevan Novel," Slavic and East European Journal, Volume 65, Issue 4, Spring 2022.
“Weltliteratur and Its Others," PMLA, Volume 136, Issue 3, May 2021, p. 356-369.
"The 'Serbian Poem' in Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe" (with Katja Perat), Little-Known Documents, PMLA 135.3, May 2020.
"Ja, Ben, I, Je: A Book Collection in Translation." ABAA National Collegiate Essay Prize, 2019.
REVIEWS
"On Mothers and Madhouses: Tatjana Gromača's The Divine Child, translated from Croatian by Will Firth." Reading in Translation, January 2022.
"Notes from the 'Empire of Stupidity': Dubravka Ugrešić's The Age of Skin, translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać." Reading in Translation, February 2021.
"'Scattered words (and scattered worlds)': Dubravka Ugrešić's American Fictionary, translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth and Ellen Elias-Bursać." Reading in Translation, January 2019.
INTERVIEWS
"Gals and Dolls: A Conversation with Maša Kolanović." World Literature Today, July 2022.
"'The accumulation of tragedy leads to farce': An Interview with Aleksandar Hemon." Balkanist, January 2017.
"A New View of Global Inequalities: An Interview with Manuela Boatcă." Center for the Humanities blog at Washington University in St. Louis, March 2016.