About Leah

BACKGROUND

Born and raised in the Chicago area, Leah Janeczko studied Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 1991, when she ventured off to study for a semester in Milan. Prolonging her stay time and time again to further perfect her Italian, she never found her way back home.

In her early years in Italy she taught English to businesspeople, including many at the local Walt Disney offices. By moonlighting for them as a translator she found a natural outlet for her creativity working with comics, films, magazines and books. It grew to be her passion and she became a full-time translator for readers of all ages. Meanwhile, Disney Italy became the headquarters of Global Magazines, responsible for developing 70% of Disney’s worldwide comics content.

Leah loves translating everything from novels to comics, from children’s poems to screenplays. She particularly enjoys coming up with clever adaptations for jokes, rhymes and wordplay in general. Having lived in Milan for over 30 years, she speaks excellent modern-day Italian and fully understands its nuances. She remains faithful to the author’s voice and style while also taking great care to make her translation read as smoothly as the original text.

Now with over 25 years of experience in literary translation, Leah has been published by New York Review Books, Macmillan, Random House, Grove Atlantic, Simon & Schuster, Pushkin Press and others, and for international book fairs has translated samples of literary works by some of Italy’s leading contemporary authors.

She also writes song lyrics for Italian bands and acts as an English coach for their singers.

RECENT ACTIVITIES

In 2023, for the American Literary Translators Association, she acted as a judge for the Italian Prose in Translation Award with Jamie Richards and Jenny McPhee. (Leah was shortlisted for this award in 2020 for her translation of Rosella Postorino’s novel At the Wolf’s Table/ The Women at Hitler’s Table.)

In October 2023 she spoke at the University of Bologna’s Con Altre Parole translation festival in Forlì alongside author Rosella Postorino about translating At the Wolf’s Table.

In March 2024, she was interviewed by the podcast Harshaneeyam about being longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize alongslide author Veronica Raimo for the novel Lost on Me; listen to the episode here. In a previous episode she talked about her journey into literary translations, her translation At the Wolf’s Table, and her love for translating fiction; click here to listen.

In August 2024 she addressed the plenary session of the International IBBY Congress in Trieste, speaking about translating rhymes for children, in particular Roberto Piumini’s poem about the Coronavirus, Is There Something in the Air?

In October 2024 she was one of the fifteen literary translators working from Italian to be invited to the Dall’Italiano al Mondo conference held at the Frankfurt Buchmesse as a guest of the Italian Trade Agency and the Turin International Book fair.

Throughout the month of October 2024, Leah was Guest Curator of the Italian Lit Month blog dedicated to the promotion of Italian literature in English translation. She created, edited and oversaw this online event, which featured 50 articles contributed by over 30 professional literary translators with the aim of adding to the success of the month’s Frankfurter Buchmesse, the world’s largest trade fair for books, at which Italy was the year’s Guest of Honor. Read more about Italian Lit Month.

Leah is a member of Strade, StradeLab, the American Literary Translators Association, the Authors Guild, SIAE and Note Legali.

Her name is pronounced LAY-uh Juh-NESS-ko (or, in Italy, Ya-NETCH-ko).

Leah Janeczko uses her creativity, passion
and expert knowledge of Italian and English
to help others express their authentic voice
in a language not their own.