Clare Cavanagh

Clare Cavanagh is the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities and a professor of Slavic literatures and comparative literary studies at Northwestern University.

Cavanagh’s book Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale University Press, 2009) received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for 2010. She has translated or co-translated sixteen volumes of Polish poetry and prose, including, most recently, Adam Zagajewski’s True Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), Slight Exaggeration (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2017), and Asymmetry (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2018); Wisława Szymborska’s Map: Collected and Last Poems, with Stanisław Barańczak (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2015); and Ryszard Krynicki’s Magnetic Point: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2017).

Cavanagh’s awards include the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, fellowships from the Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a PEN Prize in Translation. She has recently been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.