Esther Kinsky (born 1956 inEngelskirchen,North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany) is a German literary translator and the author of novels and poetry.

Esther Kinsky grew up in North Rhine-Westphalia and read Slavonic studies atBonn. She works as a literary translator from the Polish, English and Russian languages into German and as the author of prose and poetry. After spending some years inLondon, she settled inBerlin.

Among her noted works are the novelAm Fluss, published by Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2014^[1] and appearing in English in January 2018 asRiver, translated by Iain Galbraith and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.^[2][3]

Kinsky has received many awards both for her literary work and her translations, including in 2015 theKranichsteiner Literature Prize and, forAm Fluss, thePreis der SWR-Bestenliste of Baden-Baden.^[4]

From the summer semester of 2016 she held the annualThomas Kling lectureship in Poetry at theUniversity of Bonn. During the 2017/2018 fall/winter semester she was theAugust Wilhelm von Schlegel Visiting Professor of the Poetics of Translation at theFree University of Berlin.^[5]

In 2018 her novel,Hain: Geländeroman was published bySuhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, and won the Belletristik (Belles Lettres) category of theLeipzig Book Fair Prize, 2018.^[6] This work has been published in an English translation by Caroline Schmidt as Grove: A Field Novel (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020). In 2023 she wrote Seeing Further, a non-fiction recounting of her purchase and restoration of a small cinema in Hungary. It is published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions, trans. Caroline Schmidt (2024).

Kinsky was married to the German-Scottish literary translatorMartin Chalmers (1948–2014).

• Kinsky, Esther (2014).Am Fluss. Berlin.ISBN 978-3-95757-056-7.OCLC 878177983.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• —— (2018).Hain Geländeroman. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.ISBN 978-3-518-42789-7.OCLC 1008600257.

• —— (2023).Weiter Sehen. Von der unwiderstehlichen Magie des Kinos. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.ISBN 978-3-518-22544-8.

• Kinsky, Esther; Galbraith, Iain (2018).River. Oakland, California.ISBN 978-1-945492-19-8.OCLC 1052766428.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• ——; Schmidt, Caroline (2020).Grove : a field novel. Oakland, California.ISBN 978-1-945492-38-9.OCLC 1121603799.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• ——; Schmidt, Caroline (2023).Seeing Further. Great Britain.ISBN 978-1-80427-116-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

• 1956 births
• Living people
• German translators
• German women writers

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• CS1 maint: location missing publisher