Ann Goldstein: Meet Elena Ferrante’s Translator

Ann Goldstein didn’t start learning Italian until the age of thirty-seven. She arranged classes with her fellow New Yorker copy department colleagues, spending a year studying grammar before reading Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Since then, as well as an illustrious career at the New Yorker (editing the likes of John Updike and Janet Malcolm) Goldstein has become one of the world’s most sought-after translators of Italian fiction, working on books by Primo Levi, Jhumpa Lahiri, and most famously, Elena Ferrante.

Goldstein has been translating the works of the superstar novelist Elena Ferrante - who has thus far kept her real identity hidden - since 2004, beginning with Days of Abandonment.

The publication of the new Ferrante novel, The Lying Life of Adults, is among the year’s biggest literary events, and Ann Goldstein is your perfect guide. See her in conversation with Lennie Goodings, Chair of Virago Press and author of A Bite of the Apple: A Life with Writers, Books and Virago.

This is a pre-recorded event.