MILES, Valerie Jean

Academic training

30/06/1986. Llicenciada. International Relations. UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Professional experience

Valerie Miles, writer, editor and translator, was born in the United States and currently lives in Barcelona. She co-founded British magazine Granta’s Spanish-language project in 2003 whilst managing the publishing house Emecé, part of Grupo Planeta, in Spain. She also established the New York Review of Books’ (NYRB) contemporary classics series in Spanish during her time as associate director of Alfaguara. She has written pieces for The New Yorker, The New York Times, El País, La Nación, The Paris Review and Granta, among other publications. She is currently a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States for her translation of Crematorio by Rafael Chirbes, soon to be published by New Directions, for whom she has also translated works by Enrique Vila-Matas. Her co-translation and extended edition of Juan Eduardo Cirlot's Diccionario de símbolos (A Dictionary of Symbols) will be published by the New York Review of Books in 2020. Her translation of Esto también pasará (This too shall pass) by Milena Busquets was selected as a finalist for the Impac Prize in 2016, as well as receiving the PEN Translation Prize. Her most recent publication from Yale University Press is a study of Nobakov by Azar Nafisi, which gave rise to the author’s best-seller, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Valerie curated the exhibition Bolaño Archive. 1977-2003 at the CCCB in Barcelona, the fruits of extensive research into the writer’s private archives. She is currently involved in the publication and translation of Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares' monumental memoirs, for the NYRB. Her first book, A Thousand Forests in One Acorn presents a collection of conversations with some of the twentieth century’s most important writers. It was first published in English and later translated into Spanish under the title Mil bosques en una bellota. She a member of Malba Writers Residence’s honorary committee in Buenos Aires, alongside John M. Coetzee, Soledad Costantini, Christian Lund and Jorge Monteleone, and she was named one of the “most influential professionals in publishing” by the El Libro Foundation in Argentina.