Elisabeth Lauffer grew up bilingually (German-English) in rural Vermont and holds an M.Ed. in Learning & Teaching from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ms. Lauffer received her undergraduate degree in German Studies and from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University. Following graduation, she moved to Hamburg on a yearlong DAAD Study Scholarship, later relocating to Berlin, where she got her start in commercial and technical translation. She now lives and works in Vermont.
Ms. Lauffer recently completed translating Michael Ohl’s The Art of Naming and Christian Welzbacher’s The Radical Fool of Capitalism for the MIT Press, both titles to appear in Spring 2018. In 2016, her first full-length book translation, Alexander Pschera’s Animal Internet, was published by New Vessel Press. An excerpt of Anna Weidenholzer’s Winter is Good for Fish appeared in the 2015 Festival Neue Literatur reader in her translation. The same year, she was invited as one of thirteen international translators to participate in the Summer Academy of the Berlin Literary Colloquium. Ms. Lauffer was the recipient of the 2014 Gutekunst Prize for Emerging Translators for her sample translation of Veit Heinichen’s To Each His Own Death. (2017)