Anne O. Fisher is a Russian-to-English literary translator.
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 Mong to Louisville, Kentucky. There she embarked on her translation career by translating her first novel, Ilf and Petrov’s The Little Golden Calf.
In addition to being a literary translator, Fisher also worked for almost seven years in the government sector providing Russian and German language services as a self-employed contract linguist. She also taught for six years in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s program in Translation and Interpreting Studies. She is a past president of ALTA (the American Literary Translators Association). 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!