Natasha Wimmer (born 1973) is an American translator best known for her translations of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and The Savage Detectives from Spanish into English.
Natasha Wimmer grew up in Iowa.[1] She learned Spanish in Spain, where she spent four years growing up. She studied Spanish literature at Harvard University.[2] Her first job after graduating was at Farrar, Straus & Giroux from 1996 to 1999 as an assistant and then managing editor. During her time there, she produced her first translation, the Dirty Havana Trilogy by the Cuban novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.[2]
Wimmer then worked at Publishers Weekly, before leaving to work on Bolaño's books full-time. "My reason for going into publishing in the first place was that I had decided in college that I would never be a fiction writer, but I knew I wanted to be as close to books as I could. Publishing was one way, and translating turned out to be a better way for me."[3]
She has also translated Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa's The Language of Passion, The Way to Paradise, and Letters to a Young Novelist; and Marcos Giralt Torrente's Father and Son.
Wimmer has written for The Nation and The New York Times. She teaches translation at Princeton University.
Wimmer received the PEN Translation Prize in 2009. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2008 for her translation of 2666 and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2010.[4]