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 when she found that the published English translation had made it smaller in every way that mattered. 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. Strip that specificity out, as the available English editions have for over a century, and you produce a book that could have been set anywhere in 19th-century Western Europe. That was not the book she wrote.
For Espresso Publishing House
Translates from the French
Clémence Aubert
Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème has not had a proper English edition since 1897. The translations that exist are Victorian. Polite where Loti is wry, smoothed where he is uncomfortable. They lose the novel’s central effect: a narrator who, page by page, manages to condemn himself without quite meaning to. The work of producing a contemporary rendering 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, and the case she keeps returning to is that the English-language editions of these novels (Maupassant, Loti, Zola) have been rendered too palatable, for too long.
For Espresso Publishing House
Translates from the German
Renata Lenz
Renata Lenz translates German fiction into English, and she has a long-running fixation. Paul Heyse won the Nobel Prize in 1910, and within a generation his English readership had collapsed. She thinks the explanation is in the translations. They render Heyse as another melancholy North German brooder, a Storm or an early Fontane, and Heyse is nothing of the kind. He is warm. He is sensual. He is, despite writing in German, Mediterranean in feeling. Translating a German-language writer who thinks and feels like a Neapolitan turns out to be a specific kind of problem, and one she has been working on for years. She is from Freiburg im Breisgau, the city on the German-French border where the architecture still argues about which country it belongs to; she has, she would say, never quite trusted writers who can’t tolerate ambiguity. Her work for EPH extends across the Poetic Realist canon: Storm, Fontane, Keller, the others.
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. Worse, the writers who do fit have been edited, by their English translators, to fit better: accelerated past their slow passages, tidied past their digressions, moved along. 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.
Translates from the Swedish
Linnea Wahlström
Linnea Wahlström translates Swedish literary fiction into English. Her case is straightforward. English translators of Swedish prose have spent a century unable to sit with Swedish silence. They soften plainness, warm restraint, and reach for the thesaurus when the writer was content with the plain word. The result is a long shelf of books louder than their originals. She intends to correct for this, sentence by sentence. 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. Translators have been embarrassed by all of it. They have either muted the intensity into something polite, or let it tip over into camp, and a reader who meets Camilo through either is meeting a caricature. Mariana does neither. 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.