Austin Woerner

Profile

I am a writer, editor, and Chinese-English literary translator with a passion for teaching the art of creative writing and translation across different cultures and languages. My love of language and storytelling infuses my work in the classroom, and my goal as an educator is to nurture a community of writers and readers united by a shared love of literary expression and cross-cultural learning.

I joined the Centre for Translation Studies at University of Leeds in 2023 after teaching creative writing and translation in China for many years, first at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, and then at Duke Kunshan University in Suzhou. Before that, I worked as a freelance translator for close to a decade, with a focus on contemporary Chinese fiction and poetry, journalism, and the arts, during which I served as the translation editor for the innovate Chinese literary journal Chutzpah!

Research interests

My translations include a novel, The Invisible Valley by Su Wei, and two volumes of poetry by Ouyang Jianghe; in addition, my work has appeared in numerous literary journals including Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Kenyon Review. My essay "As Big as You Make It Out to Be," about the friendship I formed with the writer Su Wei through translating his novel, was selected for the 2024 Best American Essays anthology.

As a writer, reader, and translator, I am especially interested in the ways in which creativity with language can evoke other worlds, both real and imagined. At Duke Kunshan University, where I taught creative nonfiction, I produced anthologies of literary essays by students capturing vivid windows into the places they were from, from China and the United States to Morocco, Nigeria, and Nepal. My own work translating The Invisible Valley challenged me to invent an English idiom to express the experiences of Chinese sent-down youth during the Cultural Revolution and the Cantonese and minority folk cultures of Hainan Island. In addition, I am a passionate reader of science fiction and fantasy, and I am interested in how worldbuilding techniques from speculative fiction can help literary translators evoke foreign cultural worlds.

I view translation as a social activity, bringing together writers, translators, editors, and readers in a shared act of imagination. In both my teaching and my translation work, I seek to use literary texts as a springboard for conversations that deepen intercultural understanding and draw readers into the translation process in a highly participatory fashion. I work frequently with Spittoon magazine to bring the work of emerging Chinese writers into English, involving student collaborators whenever possible, and I lead an extracurricular club, the poetry translation lab @ leeds, which provides an informal platform for students and staff to connect with speakers of other languages through collaboratively translating poetry.

Qualifications

• MFA in creative writing, The New School (2013)
• BA in East Asian Studies, Yale University (2008)

Student education

At Leeds I teach postgraduate modules in literary translation and Chinese-English translation, as well as an undergraduate Chinese-English translation module. I also contribute to modules on translation theory and localisation, and I supervise both postgraduate and undergraduate Chinese-English translation projects.