Michael Henry Heim is a Professor of Slavic Languages, at the University California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his doctorate at Harvard in 1971. He is an active and prolific translator, and is fluent in Czech, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian.

He has garnered unusually wide recognition for his translations, and is considered one of the foremost literary translators active today. Heim won the 2005 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize

Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize

Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize is an annual literary prize honoring an outstanding literary translation from German into English published in the USA the previous year. The translator of the winning translation receives $10,000.00 and a stay at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin...

 for German-to-English translation of Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...

’s Death in Venice

Death in Venice

The novella Death in Venice was written by the German author Thomas Mann, and was first published in 1913 as Der Tod in Venedig. The plot of the work presents a great writer suffering writer's block who visits Venice and is liberated and uplifted, then increasingly obsessed, by the sight of a...

 (Der Tod in Venedig). A book he translated from the Dutch, Hugo Claus's

Hugo Claus

Hugo Maurice Julien Claus was a leading Belgian author who published under his own name as well as various pseudonyms. Claus' literary contributions spanned the genres of drama, the novel, and poetry; he also left a legacy as a painter and film director...

 Wonder (Der verwondering, 1962), was recently short-listed for Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award

Best Translated Book Award

Best Translated Book Award is an annual literature award given by Three Percent, the online literature magazine of Open Letter Books, which is the book translation press of the University of Rochester. It is awarded to the best original translation published that year. A long list and short list...

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Translations

• Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought (University of California Press), The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard (various theaters in the US, Canada and England). From the Russian.
• Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Knopf/Penguin)
• Milan Kundera, The Joke (Harper & Row/Penguin).
• Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Harper & Row/Penguin).
• Milan Kundera, Jacques and His Master (Harper & Row/Penguin). From the Czech.
• Bohumil Hrabal, The Death of Mr. Baltisberger (Doubleday), Too Loud a Solitude (Harcourt Brace), Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (Harcourt Brace). From the Czech.
• Vassily Aksyonov, The Island of Crimea, In Search of Melancholy Baby (Random House). From the Russian.
• Henri Troyat, Chekhov (Dutton). From the French.
• Danilo Kis, Encyclopedia of the Dead (Farrar Straus/Penguin), Early Sorrows (New Direcions). From the Serb.
• Karel Capek, The White Plague, Talks with T.G. Masaryk (Catbird). From the Czech.
• Sasha Sokolov, Astrophobia (Grove). From the Russian.
• Péter Esterházy, Helping Verbs of the Heart (Grove). From the Hungarian.
• Dubravka Ugresic, Fording the Stream of Consciousness (Northwestern). From the Croat.
• Felix Roziner, A Certain Finkelmeyer (Norton/Northwestern). From the Russian.
• Jan Neruda, Prague Tales (Chatto & Windus/CEU Press). From the Czech.
• Eduard Uspensky, Uncle Fedya (Knopf). From the Russian.
• Milos Crnjanski, Migrations (Harcourt Brace). From the Serb.
• George Konrád, The Melancholy of Rebirth (Harcourt Brace). From the Hungarian
• Bertold Brecht, The Wedding (Produced at The Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles). From the German.
• Josef Hirsal, A Bohemian Youth (Northwestern). From the Czech.
• Aleksandar Tisma, The Book of Blam (Harcourt Brace). From the Serb.
• Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, The Number Devil. (Henry Holt). From the German.
• Günter Grass, My Century (Harcourt Brace). From the German.
• Anton Chekhov, Easter Week (Shackman Press). From the Russian.

Sole- or Shared Authorship

• The Russian Journey of Karel Havlícek Borovsky, (Slavistische Beiträge, 1979).
• Contemporary Czech, (Slavica, 1982).
• The Third Wave: Russian Literature in Emigration, ([edited with Olga Matich] Ann Arbor 1984)
• Un Babel fericit, (Bucharest 1999).