Anya Migdal
Photo by Monika Kratochvil
Bio
Anya Migdal is a writer, literary translator, musician, and actor. Her translations have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House Magazine, Plough Quarterly, Zoetrope: All Story, and the Iowa Review, among others. Migdal’s translation of Aetherial Worlds by Tatyana Tolstaya (Knopf, 2018 and Daunt Books, 2019) was long listed for the National Book Award in Translated Literature and the PEN Translation Prize, and was shortlisted for the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Migdal was born in Russia and was a preteen when she moved to the United States with her family. It was this lucky turn of events—moving at precisely the right age—that led Migdal to become fully bilingual and bicultural; to feel equally at ease in both English and Russian. In addition to translating, Migdal is currently working on a collection of her own short stories as well as pursuing an MFA in creative writing at New York University’s low-residency program. A single mother, Migdal resides in Brooklyn with her two children, Alice and Anton.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Russian of The Petrovs In and Around the Flu by Alexei Salnikov (b. 1978). Salnikov has worked as a boiler room operator, a garage mechanic, a guard, a plumber, a freelance journalist, and a translator from English to Russian. The Petrovs In and Around the Flu tells the story of an ordinary family whose routine gets ruined by a bad case of the flu and transforms into a weirdly funny and eerie hallucinatory dream—or a nightmare.
I'm honored to have received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literary Translation this year. I’m grateful not only for the grant itself, but most importantly, for the NEA’s voice of support for Alexei Salnikov's work. The fellowship validates the importance of introducing this exceptional writer to an English-speaking audience. The Petrovs In and Around the Flu is already an award-winning bestseller in Russia; it was adapted into a feature film, Petrov's Flu, that premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Yet Salnikov's brilliance is still unknown in the United States. Thanks to the generous support of NEA, there is now an opportunity to change that. I am grateful to be able to be a part of that change.