Born in Auburn, California, The United States
Website: http://www.estherallen.com

Esther Allen is a writer and translator. A professor in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian and French Ph.D. Programs at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and at Baruch College (CUNY), she is a two-time recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships (1995 and 2010) and was a 2009-2010 Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2014-2015, she was a Biography Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, working on a biography of José Martí under contract with Henry Holt & Co.

For PEN International and the Institut Ramon Lull, she edited To Be Translated or Not To Be, published in English, Catalan and German and distributed at the 2007 Frankfurt Book Fair.

She co-founded the PEN World Voices Festival in 2005, and guided the work of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund from its inception in 2003 to 2010. In 2006, the French government named her a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres. In 2012 she received the Feliks Gross Award from the CUNY Academy for the Arts and Sciences.

She heads the Development Committee of the American Literary Translators Association, and serves on the board of Writers Omi, on the Advisory Council to the Spanish-language program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and on the Selection Committee for the French Voices translation subvention program of the Services culturels français.