Translates from the Italian
Idara Crespi
Idara Crespi is the founding publisher of Espresso Publishing House and the translator responsible for the Italian catalogue. She was born in Milan and grew up between Italy and Canada, and she came to translation through writing about arts and culture: she was reviewing an Italian novel, and by the end of the piece she wanted to hear the book in English the way she had heard it in Italian. When the review was done, she translated the novel herself, and the imprint grew from that project. Her full biography appears on the About page.
For Espresso Publishing House
Translates from the Spanish
Inés Bou
There is a way of reading that comes from growing up between two languages: the habit of noticing, instinctively, when a word is doing the work of its setting and when it has been imported from somewhere it does not belong. Inés Bou grew up in Barcelona between Catalan at home and Castilian everywhere else, and the habit was already in place by the time she started thinking about literature. She has applied it, since then, to 19th-century Spanish fiction. Most insistently to Emilia Pardo Bazán. The settled English reading of Pardo Bazán treats her as a Spanish Naturalist in the line of Zola: urban, industrial, deterministic. But Pardo Bazán is Galician. Her novels are set in the wet green northwest, not the sunny south; her Naturalism is saturated with folk religion, regional Catholicism, and a social order that had almost nothing to do with anything Parisian. None of that is local colour. It is the ground the novels stand on, and it is what Inés Bou translates to keep. Read with all of it left in, Pardo Bazán stops resembling the writer the Zola comparison predicts.
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Translates from the French
Clémence Aubert
Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème turns on an effect that is easy to lose: a narrator who, page by page, manages to condemn himself without quite meaning to. Producing a contemporary English that stays with that irony, rather than rescuing the narrator from himself, is the project that brought Clémence Aubert to EPH. She lives in Lyon. The body of her work has been 19th-century French fiction, Maupassant and Loti and Zola, and her conviction is that these novels are stranger and less comfortable than their English reputations suggest, and better for being read that way.
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Translates from the German
Renata Lenz
Renata Lenz is a literary translator working from German into English. Her subject is the German Poetic Realists, Storm and Fontane and Keller, and above all Paul Heyse, whose disappearance from English-language reading lists has been her long-running preoccupation. Her working conviction, and the reason she came to him, is that the books were never the problem. She drafts fast and revises slowly, reading aloud against the German until the two texts agree about what kind of sentence this is, and she keeps a running log of the compound nouns she meets, on the theory that the words with no English behind them are the ones that tell you what a writer actually notices. She will tell you on the page which of her own choices she is still not sure about. She is from Freiburg im Breisgau, which bought itself free of its counts in 1368, handed itself to the Habsburgs, and spent the next four and a half centuries at the far western edge of the empire that owned it. The city has never entirely settled the question of what it belongs to, and she has never entirely trusted writers who cannot tolerate ambiguity.
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Translates from the Russian
Mira Sorokina
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. And on the larger pattern it points to. The English-language reception of 19th- and early-20th-century Russian fiction has been shaped almost entirely by what fits on a shelf next to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and the writers who don’t fit (Goncharov, Kuprin, Leskov, the early Bunin) have suffered for it. And the fitting happens in the English. A slow passage invites acceleration, a digression invites tidying, and underneath both sits an assumption that a reader wants the story and not the tempo. The slowness, she argues, is often the meaning. Mira is from Kazan, where Russian and Tatar, Orthodox and Muslim, European and Asian have coexisted for five centuries; the way a city looks at itself, she would tell you, is always a translation problem. She is the Russian literary translator for Espresso Publishing House.
For Espresso Publishing House
Translates from the Swedish
Linnea Wahlström
Linnea Wahlström translates Swedish literary fiction into English. Her case is straightforward. Swedish prose is quiet, and the quiet is doing the work: the plainness is the statement, the restraint is the feeling. English is impatient with that silence and wants to fill it in, with a warmer word, a fuller clause, something from the thesaurus where the writer was content with the plain one. She works sentence by sentence to leave the silence where the writer put it. She grew up in a parsonage in rural Värmland, in the country Selma Lagerlöf walked and named. She moved to Stockholm in her twenties and learned the trade in a small literary publisher there, by reading and by working alongside editors who had been doing it longer than she had. She does not have a graduate degree. She does have a long-running commitment to Victoria Benedictsson, whose Pengar she read in her late twenties and re-read the same weekend, in Swedish, to confirm it was as good as she thought. She joined Espresso Publishing House as the Swedish literary translator in May 2026.
Translates from the Portuguese
Mariana Quintela
There is no Camilo Castelo Branco in English, and Mariana Quintela thinks she knows why. It is not that Portugal’s great 19th-century novelist is minor. He is, at home, unmissable. It is that his books are full of high feeling: tears, oaths, broken engagements, deathbed promises, love pursued to ruin. High feeling is hard to carry across a language, and it fails in two directions: muted into politeness, or tipped over into camp. Mariana works down the middle. Her conviction is that Portuguese feeling can be carried into an English a serious reader will take seriously, and that the work of doing so is long overdue. She grew up in the Minho, the rain-green north that Camilo wrote into nearly every novel: small parishes, granite churches, the bells dividing the day between work and prayer. She lives now in Porto, above the river that carried so many of her countrymen to Brazil and, now and then, carried them back. She came to translation by reading, not by training, and by the slow apprenticeship of the work itself. She is the Portuguese literary translator for Espresso Publishing House.