Howard Goldblatt

Howard Goldblatt is an American literary translator and sinologist, widely regarded as the foremost English-language translator of modern and contemporary Chinese fiction. Born in California in 1939, he first encountered Chinese while serving with the US Navy in Taiwan in the early 1960s, staying on to study at the Mandarin Center before returning to the United States.

He taught at San Francisco State University and the University of Colorado Boulder, and was research professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame from 2002 to 2011.

He has translated more than fifty volumes from mainland China and Taiwan, including six novels by Nobel laureate Mo Yan, among them Red Sorghum and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. He received the National Translation Award in 2000 for Chu T'ien-wen's Notes of a Desolate Man and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009.