John Cullen

John Cullen in the translator of more than fifteen books from the French, Italian, German, and Spanish. He began his association with Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in 1995 and his translations for the imprint include Susanna Tamaro’s Follow Your Heart from the Italian, Christa Wolf’s Medea from the German, and Henning Boetius’s The Phoenix from the German. Last year, two of his translations were short-listed for The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award: Margaret Mazzantini’s Don’t Move from the Italian and Yasmina Khadra’s The Swallows of Kabul from the French.

Cullen is the also the co-author with Alexandra de Borchgrave of Villard: The Life and Times of an American Titan and is a freelance scout for foreign books. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from Loyola University and University of Virginia respectively, and earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Texas. A year of full-time university teaching after graduate school gave him the urge to travel, and he set out on the first of a series of sojourns in Europe, living in Paris, Rome, Vienna, and Madrid, among other places, which for a time included his dauntless little Fiat Panda; these sojourns generally ended after his contributions to various European economies had reduced him to penury, a process that took anywhere from eighteen months to three years. Originally from New Orleans, John Cullen lives in Millbrook, New York, with the writer Valerie Martin.