Eliot Weinberger

Translator, essayist, and editor Eliot Weinberger was born in New York City. Known for his penetrating observations, novel juxtapositions, and avant-garde style, he is the author of more than a dozen essay collections, including Angels & Saints (New Directions, 2020), which the Times Literary Supplement named an International Book of the Year; The Wall, the City, and the World (Readux Books, 2014); An Elemental Thing (New Directions, 2007), hailed by the Village Voice as one of the 20 Best Books of the Year; Written Reaction: Poetics Politics Polemics (Marsilio Publishers, 1996); and Works on Paper (New Directions, 1986). In 2000, he became the first American literary writer to earn the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle, Mexico’s highest order awarded to non-nationals. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages.

As a teenager, Weinberger became close friends with the poet Octavio Paz, which led to Weinberger’s translation of a large number of Paz’s books, including Eagle or Sun? (New Directions, 1976), Selected Poems (New Directions, 1984), In Light of India (Harcourt, 1997), and The Poems of Octavio Paz (New Directions, 2012). Weinberger has also translated the work of Vicente Huidobro, Cecilia Vicuña, Xavier Villaurrutia, Bei Dao, and Jorge Luis Borges. His co-translation with Suzanne Jill Levine and Esther Allen of Borges’s Selected Non-Fiction (Penguin Putnam, 1999) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

Weinberger is also a highly regarded political commentator. One of his collections of political essays, What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (New Directions, 2005), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism and was read or performed at hundreds of events worldwide for the fourth anniversary of the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. Weinberger received the Jeanette Schocken / Bremerhaven Citizens' Prize for Literature in 2021 for his work as an “agent provocateur for a better world […] a great warner against the loss of freedom and human dignity.” He lives in New York City.