About Me
Sean Gasper Bye is a translator from Polish and Interim Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).
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 focuses on contemporary fiction and reportage, and also works with historical texts, theater and video games.
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.
In addition to his work at ALTA, Sean is active in supporting the translation community. He 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.