Alison Anderson

Alison Anderson works between original fiction and literary translation from her home in Switzerland. The Summer Guest links three women through a diary that may point to a lost novel by Anton Chekhov. In 1888, physician Zinaida Lintvaryova, blinded by illness, records her friendship with the young writer at her family's estate in eastern Ukraine. More than a century later, translator Katya Kendall and London editor Ana Harding must decide what the diary means, whether its manuscript is authentic, and what publication would ask of them. Harper published The Summer Guest in 2016 as a literary historical mystery inspired by Chekhov's real connection with the Lintvaryov family. The audiobook assigns its perspectives to Julia Emelin, Lucy Rayner, and Kirsten Holly Smith. Anderson's translations include work by Muriel Barbery, J. M. G. Le Clézio, and Hélène Grémillon, and she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her novel uses translation not as background labor but as an ethical act of interpretation across language, time, and competing desires.