About Julia
Born in Moscow, Julia Meitov Hersey moved to the U.S. at the age of nineteen and has been straddling the two cultures ever since. She lives north of Boston with her family and a hyperactive dog, juggling all her beloved translation projects and making sure Russian literature is well represented on the American market.
Julia is the winner of the 2021 Science Fiction and Fantasy Rosetta Awards (SFFRA)for best translated work (long form): DAUGHTER FROM THE DARK by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, Harper Voyager, February 2020.
Accolades
I was stunned by what I read -- not just by the story, which was a revelation to me in itself, but also by the vividness and fluency and power of Hersey's translation. It has that marvelous clarity you see from translators who are accomplished writers in their own right -- it never calls attention to itself, it always gets out of the way of the original work, but it also has an enormous integrity of its own, born of a precise understanding of Russian and English and of the deeper, international language of storytelling itself. I've studied and reread Hersey's translation, and through it VITA NOSTRA has become a powerful influence on my own writing. It's a book that has the potential to become a modern classic of its genre. It deserves a global audience in English, and I believe that Hersey's translation is the way to get it.
Lev Grossman, novelist, author of The Magicians trilogy and The Silver Arrow
Julia can translate the song of a hummingbird, the whisper of the ocean, the soft melody of the sunset, and the oratorio of the sunrise. She knows the mysteries of the Great Speech and can verbalize sixteen types of silence, dancing clouds, untold signals of newborn galaxies, and photons of human soul. This is because she's not human-- she is really an elf. We are so grateful for her friendship and her talent.
- Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, novelists, authors of The Scar, Vita Nostra, and Daughter from the Dark
