Anne O. Fisher is a Russian-to-English literary translator. She translates drama, prose, and (mostly with co-translator [and husband] Derek Mong) poetry. A past president of ALTA (the American Literary Translators Association), Fisher has taught in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s program in Translation and Interpreting Studies since 2018.
Fisher, a native Tulsan, graduated with a B.A. in Russian from the University of Oklahoma, having studied for three and a half years abroad (one year each in Scotland, Austria, and Russia, as well as a summer in Germany). She received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan with a dissertation on the Soviet writing duo Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. Fisher taught Russian language, literature, and culture at Williams College and the College of Wooster before following her soon-to-be husband Derek to Louisville, Kentucky, where she translated her first novel, Ilf and Petrov’s The Little Golden Calf. For almost seven years she worked in the government sector providing Russian language services as a self-employed contract linguist. Fisher now lives with her husband and son in Indiana.
Reading with co-translator (and husband) Derek Mong from The Joyous Science at Wabash College in 2018.
Why yes, I did pose by that famous chair during my trip to Odessa.
At a reading of The Freedom Factory at Ohio State in 2017.
Pilgrimage to Odessa in 2009. Aleksandr Rozenboym and Sasha Ilf kindly took me on a tour of “Ilf’s Odessa.”
The Twelve Chairs, hot off the presses.
So much Ilf and Petrov!