Eliot Weinberger

Eliot Weinberger was born on February 6, 1949, in New York, New York.

Weinberger is the primary translator of Octavio Paz into English. His anthology American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders (Marsilio Publishers, 1993) was a bestseller in Mexico, and his edition of Jorge Luis Borges’s Selected Non-Fictions (Penguin, 1999) received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

In 1992, Weinberger was given PEN’s first Gregory Kolovakos Award for his work in promoting Hispanic literature in the United States. In 2000, he was the first American literary writer to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico.

Weinberger’s prose publications include the essay collection Karmic Traces: 1993–1999 (New Directions, 2000) and Bei Dao’s Unlock (New Directions, 2000), co-translated with the historian Iona Man-Cheong. Weinberger is also the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (2003).