Laura Marris is a poet and translator. Her work has appeared in the North American Review, The Yale Review, No Tokens, The Cortland Review, The New York Times, The Believer, The Point, The Volta, and elsewhere. Press about her translations has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic.
Books she has translated have been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. She is the recipient of a 2013 Daniel Varoujian award from the New England Poetry Club and a 2022 Work in Progress grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. She has also been a writer in residence at The University at Buffalo's Coalesce BioArt Lab.
Her recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague (Knopf), Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget (Scribner), and To Live is to Resist, a biography of Antonio Gramsci (University of Chicago Press). She has also translated Louis Guilloux's novel Blood Dark (New York Review Books), Paol Keineg's Triste Tristan and Other Poems (with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press), and Christophe Boltanski’s The Safe House (University of Chicago Press), as well as experimental translation projects for Asymptote and The Brooklyn Rail.
She has presented her work at Brown, Duke, Yale, and Boston University, where she served as director of Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, an organization dedicated to documenting poetry’s role in our lives.
At MacDowell in 2015, Marris finished a draft of her translation of Louis Guilloux's novel Le Sang noir and her own first collection of poems, Night Palace. In 2022, she finished the first draft of her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, which will be published by Graywolf Press in 2024. In this collection of essays, she focuses on landscapes where personal and ecological loneliness entangle and inform each other.
Photo by Matt Kenyon
