Writer, translator, and independent scholar Edward Gauvin

has made a living by translating almost exclusively creative work in various fields from film to fiction, with a personal focus on contemporary comics (BD) and post-Surrealist literatures of the fantastic. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Guardian, and World Literature Today, and placed 1st and 2nd in the British Comparative Literature Association’s John Dryden Translation Competition. It has also been shortlisted for several major awards at home and abroad—the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, the National Translation Award—and twice nominated for French-American Foundation Translation Prize.

He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, the Fulbright program, and the Centre National du Livre, as well as residencies from Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, the Banff Centre, the Belgian government, and the Regional Council of Aquitaine. A multiple grantee of the French Voices program from the French Embassy, he is a frequent contributor to their cultural initiatives.

A devotee of short fiction, he has contributed more than 100 translations to such journals as Tin House, Conjunctions, Subtropics, The Harvard Review, and The Southern Review, and anthologies from Penguin, Dalkey Archive, and Macmillan, as well as various year’s-best collections. He has written extensively on the post-WWII French fantastic for Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s Weird Fiction Review.

Under the name H.V. Chao, he publishes his own fiction in such venues as The Kenyon Review, The Antigonish Review, The Nashwaak Review, Birkensnake, and The Saturday Evening Post. His stories have also appeared in Brèves, Le Visage Vert, and Angle Mort in French translation.

As a translation advocate, he has written for The Paris Review, LitHub, the National Endowment for the Arts, French Culture, and Three Percent.

The translator of over 450 graphic novels, he has received over twenty Eisner Award nominations and two Batchelder Honors from the American Library Association. From 2016–18, he co-hosted a monthly podcast on European comics with the late Dr. Derek Royal at the Comics Alternative. With artist Claire Stephens, he has published short comics on the paradoxes of translation in the Arkansas International and Words Without Borders, where he is a contributing editor for comics.

In 2019 and 2021, he taught at the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference.