Jessica Moore

Jessica Moore is an author and Booker-nominated literary translator. Her most recent book, The Whole Singing Ocean (2020), plunges us into memory, magic, ecological grief and the true story of a boat school. Jessica’s first collection, Everything, now (Brick Books 2012), has been called “a powerful journey through love and loss – serving, ultimately, to unsettle any notion of a boundary between them.” The book is partly a conversation with her translation of Turkana Boy (Talonbooks), a poetic novel by Jean-François Beauchemin, for which she won a PEN America Translation Award. She is a former Lannan writer-in-residence and Banff International Literary Translation Centre alumnus, as well as a former VP for the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada. Her translation of Maylis de Kerangal’s moving and unusual story of a heart transplant, Mend the Living, was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize and won the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize. Jessica lives in Toronto, near the shores of Lake Ontario, that inland sea.