Josephine Balmer is a poet and translator. Her works include the Bloodaxe publications – Sappho: Poems and Fragments, short-listed for the US Lambda prize, and Classical Women Poets, commended by the European Poetry Translation Prize and the Runciman Award. In 2004, Bloodaxe simultaneously published her translation, Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate, and a first poetry collection, Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions. Her collection, The Word for Sorrow, based around Ovid’s exile poems, for which she was awarded a Wingate Foundation Scholarship, was published in 2008. Previous awards include a South East Arts Writers Bursary, two Authors’ Foundation awards and an Arts Council ‘Write Out Loud’ award.
In 2001, Josephine edited Rearranging the World, an anthology of contemporary literature in translation. Her reviews have appeared in the Observer, Independent on Sunday, Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman, among others. She is also reviews editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. Chair of the Translators’ Association from 2002 to 2005, Josephine has been a judge for the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation. She is also completing a Ph.D. by Publication at the University of East Anglia. She lives in Sussex with her husband, the journalist Paul Dunn.
