—Günter Grass
Ági Bori originally hails from Hungary, and she has lived in the United States for more than thirty years. A decade ago, she decided to try her hand at translating and discovered she loved it. Her translations and writings are available or forthcoming in 3:AM, Apofenie, Asymptote, The Baffler, B O D Y, the Forward, Hopscotch Translation, Hungarian Literature Online, the Los Angeles Review, Litro Magazine, MAYDAY, Northwest Review, Points in Case, The Rumpus, Tablet, Trafika Europe, and elsewhere. She is a translation editor at the Los Angeles Review.
Unlike Russell Baker’s memoir, Growing Up—the first book she was assigned back in college—which depicts Baker’s childhood and young adulthood during the Great Depression and WWII, Ági Bori's growing up took place behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary in the seventies and the eighties. Her relationship with Hungarian literature remains strong, thanks to the early period of her life when the tiny seeds of reading began to germinate in her brain, eventually growing into a tree with a crown wide enough to span across continents. It is this nascent love of books that evolved into a lifelong passion for reading and translating. In addition to reading and writing in Hungarian and English, her favorite avocation is reading Russian short stories in their native language.