Clare Cavanagh

Clare Cavanagh (born May 23, 1956) is an American literary critic, a Slavist, and a translator.

She is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University.

An acclaimed translator of contemporary Polish poetry, she is currently under contract to write the authorized biography of Czesław Miłosz.

She holds a B.A from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.A. and PhD from Harvard University (1978, 1981 and 1988 respectively).

Before coming to Northwestern University, she taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Her work has been translated into Russian, Polish, Hungarian, French, Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese.

She has published a paper about post-colonial literature of Poland.

Her honors include: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West.

the William Riley Parker Prize of the Modern Language Association; the AATSEEL Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book in Slavic Literature; the Ilchester Lecture in Slavonic Literatures, Oxford University; the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation; the Katharine Washburne Memorial Lecture in Translation; the PEN/Book-of-the Month Club Prize for Outstanding Literary Translation; the AATSEEL Award for Outstanding Translation from a Slavic Language; elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.

Cavanagh's essays and translations “have appeared in TLS, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, Partisan Review, Common Knowledge, Poetry, Literary Imagination and other periodicals.”