Elena Balzamo

Elena Balzamo is a specialist in Scandinavian and Russian literatures, an essayist, translator, and literary critic. Born in Moscow in 1956, she received her university education in Soviet Russia before settling permanently in Paris in 1981. A historian of Scandinavian languages ​​and literatures, she wrote her doctoral thesis on Scandinavian folktales.

A multi-award-winning translator, she has introduced French-speaking audiences to numerous Swedish authors, including August Strindberg, Hjalmar Söderberg, Jonas Karlsson, Edith Södergran, Fredrik Sjöberg, and Stina Stoor, as well as Danish (Herman Bang), Norwegian (Aksel Sandemose), and Russian (Gaito Gazdanov) writers.

A lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and a regular contributor to Le Monde des Livres, she has led a literary translation seminar at the Swedish Institute in Paris for many years.

Winner of numerous awards, including the Academy's Translation Prize Swedish, winner of the Prix Sévigné and the Prix Gilbert-Musy, Elena Balzamo also turned to personal writing starting in 2015. She is the author of Five Russian Stories (Noir sur Blanc), then Isosceles Triangle, Decals, Expanded Perimeter and Zigzags, published by Éditions Marie Barbier.