John Balcom

John Balcom is Professor Emeritus at the Middlebury Institute of Internationals Studies at Monterey, where he taught for over twenty-five years.  He received his Ph.D. in Chinese and Comparative Literature from Washington University in St Louis. He has lived and worked in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. He has taught and given workshops in the US, Europe, and Asia, including the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference and the BCLT Literary Translation Summer School. Balcom is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association and co-chaired the first Salzburg Global Seminar on literary translation. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, including an NEA Fellowship, his translations have won or been nominated for many awards: his Taiwan’s Indigenous Writers: An Anthology of Stories, Poems and Essays and There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night by Cao Naiqian both won Northern California Books Awards; his translation of Huang Fan’s Zero won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award; and his translation of Ya Hsien’s Abyss was a finalist for the PEN Poetry in Translation Award and a Northern California Book Award.

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