Anne O. Fisher is a Russian-to-English literary translator.
Fisher, a native Tulsan, managed to get a B.A. in Russian from the University of Oklahoma even though she spent more time studying abroad than in Oklahoma (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 translated her first novel, Ilf and Petrov’s The Little Golden Calf, followed by many other translations, the most recent being Pioneer Summer by Elena Malysova and Kateryna Sylvanova.
In addition to being a literary translator, Fisher spent almost seven years in the government sector, providing Russian and German language services as a contract linguist. She also taught in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s MA program in Translation and Interpreting Studies for several years; currently, she teaches first-year German at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Fisher is Translation Editor and, with Derek Mong, Co-Editor of the literary magazine At Length.
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!