Idara Crespi
Literary Translator & Founding Editor
Idara Crespi was born in Milan and grew up between Italy and Canada. She studied Journalism at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary — a practical education, oriented toward readers rather than disciplines — and came to translation through her work writing about arts and culture. She was reviewing an Italian novel when she found the published English translation had made it smaller in every way that mattered. When the review was done, she translated the novel herself. Espresso Publishing House grew from that project.
Her work begins with a question that guides everything Espresso Publishing House does: which novels — celebrated in their original languages, beloved by generations of readers in France, Italy, Spain, or Germany — have never been adequately translated into English? Which works deserve the kind of careful, unhurried editorial attention that transforms a good translation into a genuinely readable book?
The answers, she has found, are more numerous than most readers would expect. The English-language literary canon is remarkable. But it is also, by any measure, incomplete — and the gap between what has been translated and what deserves to be translated is one of the most interesting territories in literature.
Idara's editions are known for their elegant presentation and the quality of their contextual framing. Each title she translates is accompanied by an original introduction, placing the work and its author in their historical and literary moment without diminishing the pleasure of encountering the story itself.
Her first translation, The Blind Woman of Sorrento by Francesco Mastriani, was published in March 2026 — the first complete English translation of a novel once read by millions of Italians across the peninsula. She is currently at work on two further Italian titles: Giovanni Verga's Story of a Blackcap (pre-order now; forthcoming March 2027) and Marta, or Faith, the opening volume of Mastriani's epic I Misteri di Napoli, forthcoming in September 2026.
Espresso Publishing House
Espresso Publishing House is a boutique literary imprint dedicated to foreign-language fiction that merits an English-language life. We look for works that are legally available, commercially interesting, and — above all — genuinely worth reading: novels with literary ambition, historical depth, and the capacity to surprise readers who encounter them for the first time.
We do not republish existing translations. Each Espresso edition is a new translation made directly from the original-language source text, prepared specifically for a contemporary English-language audience. We care about the quality of the translation, the design of the book, and the framing that helps readers understand why they are holding something worth their time.
Our catalog currently spans Italian and Spanish literature, with French, German, and Russian titles in preparation. The Espresso Italian Classics series launched in March 2026 with Francesco Mastriani's The Blind Woman of Sorrento. The Espresso Spanish Classics series opens in May 2026 with Alarcón's The Three-Cornered Hat, translated by Inés Bou.
The name reflects our ambitions: concentrated, carefully crafted, small-batch. European in spirit, international in scope. Every title we publish is there because we believe it belongs.
On Translation
Every Espresso Publishing House edition begins with the original. Not a previous translation, not a summary or adaptation — the source text in its original language, read closely, worked through sentence by sentence. What emerges is a new English text: one made specifically for contemporary readers, not constrained by the conventions of earlier translation eras or the limits of a different generation's English.
The novels EPH publishes were written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That era's Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Russian prose has its own rhythms, its own formal conventions, its own relationship between sentence structure and tone. A translation that simply updates the vocabulary while leaving the architecture of the original intact often produces something that reads like a period piece rather than a living text. EPH's approach is the reverse: stay faithful to what the original actually does — its wit, its pacing, its register — and find the English that delivers the same effect to a reader who has never encountered the original.
Each title also includes an original introduction, a translator's note, and where the text requires it, historical notes. These are not academic apparatus. They are part of the reading experience — the framing that lets a first-time reader understand what they're holding, where the author came from, and why the novel still has something to say. The apparatus should open the book, not close it down.
EPH works with specialist translators assigned by language — each responsible for a particular literary tradition, and each building expertise in the specific prose voice of their authors. That depth is not incidental. You translate a novelist differently after you've read three of his novels than after you've read one. The translations reflect it.
Our Translators
Espresso Publishing House works with a team of specialist translators. Each is assigned a language tradition and works with EPH across multiple titles, building continuity and depth within their literary field.
Idara Crespi — Italian
Idara Crespi is the founding publisher of Espresso Publishing House and the translator responsible for the Italian catalogue. Her translations include The Blind Woman of Sorrento (Francesco Mastriani, 2026), the forthcoming Story of a Blackcap (Giovanni Verga), and Marta, or Faith — the first volume of Mastriani's epic I Misteri di Napoli, scheduled for September 2026. Her full biography appears above.
Inés Bou — Spanish
Growing up in Barcelona meant navigating between Catalan at home and Castilian at school — a split she managed without thinking about it until she started studying literature and recognised, belatedly, that it had been shaping her all along. She read Spanish and Comparative Literature at the Universitat de Barcelona, then took her MA at University College London, where her thesis argued that every English translator of Emilia Pardo Bazán had made the same mistake: rendering her as a Spanish disciple of Zola, urban and deterministic, when Pardo Bazán is unmistakably Galician — northern, provincial, saturated with a world that had almost nothing to do with Paris. Strip that specificity away and you produce a book that could have been written anywhere. That is Inés's working brief. The Three-Cornered Hat is her first translation for Espresso Publishing House.
Clémence Aubert — French
Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème has not had a proper English edition since 1897, and Clémence Aubert thinks the reason is structural. The existing translations are Victorian affairs — polite where Loti is wry, smoothed where he is uncomfortable, respectful where he is not. Clémence studied at the Université Lumière Lyon 2, where her MA thesis examined what translators of Maupassant had consistently lost: his flatness, his refusal of sentiment, the quality that makes the stories still feel cold. The failure, she concluded, was not individual but systemic — a consequence of how 19th-century French fiction had been approached in English. Madame Chrysanthème is her first translation for Espresso Publishing House.
Renata Lenz — German
Renata Lenz grew up in Freiburg im Breisgau, the city on the German-French border where the old-town architecture still argues about which country it belongs to. She studied German and Comparative Literature at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, where her MA thesis asked why Paul Heyse — awarded the Nobel Prize in 1910 to considerable fanfare — had left almost no mark on his English readership. Her answer: translators had misread him. Heyse is warm, sensual, Mediterranean in sensibility despite writing in German — nothing like the melancholy North German brooder the available translations suggested. She is currently translating his Italian novellas for Espresso Publishing House.
Mira Sorokina — Russian
Most readers outside Russia encounter Kuprin, if at all, as a minor figure in the shadow of Chekhov. Mira Sorokina would push back on that. She grew up in Kazan — where Russian and Tatar, Orthodox and Muslim have coexisted for five centuries — studied Russian and world literature at Kazan Federal University, and later took her MA at the University of Edinburgh. Her thesis argued that every English translator of Goncharov's Oblomov had been embarrassed by the novel's deliberate pace and quietly accelerated the text — cutting the philosophical passages, moving things along. But the slowness is the meaning. She is currently translating Alexander Kuprin's The Garnet Bracelet for Espresso Publishing House.
Contact
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Rights, translation & general editorial
For rights enquiries, translation proposals, and editorial correspondence with Idara Crespi directly.
12, 2333 18th Ave NE
Calgary, AB T2E 8T6