Tess Lewis

2023–24 Scholar of Note

Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Montaigne, Philippe Jaccottet, Christine Angot, Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin and Cécile Wajsbrot. She is the recipient of the 2017 PEN Translation Award for her translation of Maja Haderlap’s novel Angel of Oblivion, two NEA Translation Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her essays and reviews have appeared in a number of journals and newspapers including the New Criterion, the Hudson Review, World Literature Today, the Wall Street Journal, the American Scholar, and Bookforum. She is an Advisory Editor for the Hudson Review. In 2022, she was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

In response to the high number of outstanding candidates for the Library’s annual Visiting Fellowship program, the Selection Committee has created the Scholar of Note distinction to acknowledge particularly exceptional applicants. The distinction was founded in 2022.

The Scholar of Note program is made possible through the generous support of The de Groot Foundation.