About Me
Sean Gasper Bye is a translator of Polish literature into English.
Sean began learning Polish at university as a way of reconnecting with his roots. He fell in love with Polish literature, and has been translating it since 2012. He now works full-time as a literary translator, mainly on contemporary fiction and reportage, but also on historical texts and theater.
He has translated books by authors including Małgorzata Szejnert, Szczepan Twardoch, Mikołaj Grynberg and others. His translations have won the EBRD Literary Prize and the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize; and been shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize and the National Translation Award. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow and Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University.
Sean is active in supporting the literary translation community. He serves on the board of the American Literary Translators Association, is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators' collective, and is a mentor for emerging translators through the National Centre for Writing and the Yiddish Book Center. He lives in Philadelphia.