Alta Ifland
Alta Ifland was born and grew up in Communist Romania. She came to the US as a political refugee in 1991 and, after a PhD in French language and literature (thesis on Maurice Blanchot) and a DEA with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (University of Strasbourg, mention tres bien), she taught for a brief period in academia, then worked as a book reviewer, a writer in her third language (English) and an occasional literary translator from/into Romanian, French and English. She is the author of two collections of prose poems (Voix de glace/Voice of ice, bilingual, self-translated from French, 2008 Louis Guillaume Prize; and The Snail’s Song) and two books of short stories (Elegy for a Fabulous World, 2010 finalist, Northern California Book Award, and Death-in-a-Box, 2010 Subito Press Fiction Prize). Ifland’s novel, The Wife Who Wasn’t—a satirical comedy about Moldovans versus Californians in a post-Communist world—and Speaking to No. 4—a psychological mystery about a vanished woman that takes place in France, Japan and the United States—were published by New Europe Books in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Ifland has also published dozens of scholarly articles, book reviews and translations from French into English (Raymond Queneau, Marguerite Duras, Lorand Gaspar, Jean-Luc Nancy), from English into French (W. S. Merwin), and Romanian to English (Norman Manea and Mariana Marin). After 30 years of life in the US, Ifland now lives in France.
