ENA SELIMOVIĆ is a Yugoslav-American writer and translator who works from Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian (BCMS) into English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PMLA, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slavic and East European Journal, apofenie, Journal of Literary Multilingualism, Asymptote, ANMLY, 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. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis and an MPhil in comparative literature from Trinity College Dublin.
DEAR PESTS
by Maša Kolanović
a collection of stories
co-translated with Vlad Beronja
winner of the 2020 EU Prize for Literature
VANILLA ICE CREAM
by Djurdja Knežević
recipient of 2023 NEA Translation Fellowship
SCRAPS
by Abdulah Sidran
memoir by one of Yugoslavia's
legendary poets
& screenwriters
PHANTOM PAIN
by Marina Gudelj
a collection of stories / witch's brew set in Dalmatia
BLACK
by Tatjana Gromača
a novel by an acclaimed poet, fiction writer, and journalist living in Istria
TRANSLATED EXCERPTS
Excerpt from Cloud the Color of Skin, novel by Nebojša Lujanović, Asymptote, forthcoming.
"Night Shift," excerpt from novel Vanilla Ice Cream by Djurdja Knežević, apofenie, forthcoming.
"Wartime Necessities," excerpt from the novel Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović, Academic Studies Press, forthcoming.
"Konzuming," short story by Maša Kolanović, ANMLY, October 2024.
"Aunt Jelena," short story by Marina Gudelj, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Issue 41, May 2024.
"Nepal," short story by Marina Gudelj, Words Without Borders, Turkoslavia Feature Issue, April 2024.
"Youth," poem by Shakarim Qudaiberdiuly, The Dial, January 2024 (co-translated with Sabrina Jaszi and Mirgul Kali).
"Unending," short story by Maša Kolanović, Asymptote, July 2021.
"Regarding the Father," short story by Vladimir Arsenijević, Belgrade Noir, Akashic Books, 2020.
ESSAYS
"Revolution," forthcoming Spring 2025.
"Translation as Conversion," in The Tender Translator: Olga Tokarczuk Across Languages, forthcoming Spring 2025.
"Huck Finn Sails the River Sava: Imperial Myths on Two Continents," Comparative Literature, forthcoming.
"Sins of the Mother: Unsettling Matrilineal Inheritance in East Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus," intro to mini-anthology of women-centered translations, Words Without Borders, May 2024 (co-written with Sabrina Jaszi and Mirgul Kali).
"Counting Change." Women Write the Balkans, January 2023.
"Balkan, Creole, Other: Dislocating Contemporary Multilingualisms." Journal of Literary Multilingualism, 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
Review of Damir Karakaš's Celebration, translated by Ellen Elias-Busać, World Literature Today, forthcoming November 2024.
"On the 'constellations of potential meanings': Best Literary Translations 2024, with guest editor Jane Hirshfield and series editors Noh Anothai, Wendy Call, Öykü Tekten, and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún." Reading in Translation, July 2024.
"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 at Washington University in St. Louis, March 2016.
BLOGS
"On 'Alternative Academic' Careers in the Humanities." Washington U in St. Louis Center for the Humanities, October 2017.