Kate Briggs is a translator and writer based who grew up in Somerset, UK and lives and works in Rotterdam. She is co-translator (with Roberto Nigro) of Michel Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s ‘Anthropology’ (MIT / Semiotext(e), 2008) and translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s notes for lecture courses at the Collège de France: How to Live Together and The Preparation of the Novel (Columbia University Press: 2013 and 2011).
She has published four experiments in literary criticism: Exercise in Pathetic Criticism and The Nabokov Paper (co-devised with Lucrezia Russio) (information as material: 2011 and 2013); ‘Story the Story in It’ (Amodern: 2015) and Entertaining Ideas (Ma bibliothèque: 2019), forthcoming in Spanish translation by Pau Ardid (Como Ediciones: 2021).
This Little Art, a book of thinking about translation practice, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017 and a finalist for a Believer Book Award in 2018. Este pequeño arte, translated by Rubén Martín Giráldez was published by Jekyll & Jill in 2020; translations are forthcoming into German (by Sabine Voss, Ink Press: 2021) and French (by Arianne Des Rochers, Le Quartanier: 2022). A Table Made Again for the First Time: on Kate Briggs’s This Little Art is a collection of writings by artists, writers and translators edited by Paul Becker and Francesco Pedraglio (Juan de la cosa / John of the Thing: 2021).
Conversations about her work and other subjects have appeared in Music & Literature (with Madeleine la Rue), The Tangerine (with Kevin Breathnach) and The Believer (with Kate Zambreno). She is on the editorial board of Barthes Studies, an open-access journal for research in English on the work of Roland Barthes; with MFA students past and present she co-founded Short Pieces That Move! — a reading, writing, learning and publishing initiative.
The Long Form, a book about co-living, the novel, attention and enrhythment, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2023. In 2021, Kate Briggs was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize.