Idra Novey

Idra Novey is an American novelist, poet, and translator. She translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Persian and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Career
Idra Novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. She is the author of the novels Take What You Need (2023),  a New York Times Notable Book, Ways to Disappear (2016) and Those Who Knew (2018),     which received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Those Who Knew was also a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year with over a dozen media outlets, including NPR, Esquire, BBC, Kirkus Review, and O Magazine. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian (2011), selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, The Next Country (2008), a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award, and Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, and The Paris Review. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the PEN Translation Fund, the Poetry Foundation, and The Pushcart Prize. Her works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. and a co-translation with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. She teaches fiction in the MFA Program at NYU and at Princeton University.

She is the most recent translator of The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, On Elegance While Sleeping by Viscount Lascano Tegui, Birds for a Demolition by Manoel de Barros, and The Clean Shirt of It by Paulo Henriques Britto. With Ahmad Nadalizadeh, she has co-translated from Persian a collection of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, entitled Lean Against This Late Hour (2020).

Her fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages, and she has received awards from Poets & Writers, the Poetry Foundation, the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize, and the National Endowment of the Arts.

Personal life
Idra grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, one of four siblings. She graduated from Barnard College, and from Columbia University. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

Novels

 * Take What You Need (Viking Books, 2023) ISBN 978-0593652855
 * Those Who Knew (Viking Books, 2018) ISBN 9780525560432
 * Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown & Company, 2016) ISBN 9780316298506

Full-length poetry collections

 * Soon and Wholly, Wesleyan University Press, September 2024
 * The Next Country Alice James Books, 2008. ISBN 9781882295715,
 * The Next Country Alice James Books, 2008. ISBN 9781882295715,

Chapbooks and cahiers

 * The Next Country (Poetry Society of America, 2005)
 * Clarice: The Visitor, with images by Erica Baum (Sylph Editions, 2014)

Translations

 * Dark Period, by Garous Abdolmalekian in New York Times Magazine, co-translated with Ahmad Nadalizadeh.
 * Oh! by Luis Muñoz for Poem-a-Day, co-translated with Garth Greenwell.
 * Lean Against This Late Hour, by Garous Abdolmalekian, co-translated with Ahmad Nadalizadeh, Penguin Press, 2020. ISBN 9780143134930
 * The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector New Directions, 2012; Penguin Modern Classics, 2014. ISBN 9780141197357,
 * On Elegance While Sleeping, by Emilio Lascano Tegui (Dalkey Archive, 2010. ISBN 9781564786043,
 * Birds for a Demolition, by Manoel de Barros Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010. ISBN 9780887485237,
 * The Clean Shirt of It, by Paulo Henriques Britto BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007. ISBN 9781929918935,

Short stories

 * "Conversations with My Father" (Granta, 2023)
 * "The Glacier" (The Yale Review, Summer 2021, winner of a 2022 Pushcart Prize )
 * "Harmony, Interrupted" (The Chronicles of Now, 2020)
 * "Husband and Wife During the Nightly News" (The Yale Review, Winter 2019)
 * "The Man from the Ad" (Guernica Magazine, 2011)
 * "The Specialist" (StoryQuarterly, 2015)
 * "Under the Lid" (The American Scholar, 2016)

Selected poems

 * "Night Sky with Blue Silo and a Bonfire" (A Public Space, 2022)
 * "Nearly" (Poets.org, 2019)
 * "Still Life With Invisible Canoe" (Academy of American Poets, 2015)
 * "On Returning to My Hometown in 2035" (Poetry Foundation, 2014)
 * "The Duck Shit at Clarion Creek" (Poetry Foundation, 2014)
 * "House-Sitting With Approaching Fire" (Guernica Magazine, 2014)
 * "The Visitor" (Poetry Foundation, 2012)
 * "La Prima Victoria" (Poetry Foundation, 2012)
 * "That’s How Far I’d Drive for It" (Poetry Foundation, 2023)

Nonfiction

 * "‘Change Your Life,’ the Poet Says, and a Rural Idyll Offers a Tantalizing Choice," The New York Times
 * "New Narratives and Discards" (Orion Magazine, March 2023)
 * "Monstrous Hybrids and the Conjuring of Legacy" (Yale Review, 2023)

Honors and awards

 * 2022 Pushcart Prize for "The Glacier," Yale Review
 * 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, for Ways to Disappear
 * 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize, for Ways to Disappear
 * 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction (finalist), for Ways to Disappear
 * 2016 Discover Great New Writers Pick, Barnes & Noble, for Ways to Disappear
 * 2011 National Poetry Series, for Exit, Civilian
 * 2011 Best Translated Book Award (shortlisted), for On Elegance While Sleeping
 * 2009 NEA Literature Fellowship for Translation
 * 2007 Kinereth Gensler Award, for The Next Country
 * 2007 PEN Translation Fund Grant from PEN American Center, for The Clean Shirt of It
 * 2005 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Series Fellowship, for The Next Country