K. E. Semmel

K. E. Semmel is an American literary translator, novelist and disability advocate who translates contemporary Danish and Norwegian fiction into English. He holds a BA in History from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and an MA in English from Kansas State University, and spent two years living in Denmark working for the Danish postal service -- an immersion that gave him the fluency in Danish that later underpinned his translation career, which began after he discovered and began translating the short-story writer Simon Fruelund. Since then he has translated a range of Danish and Norwegian authors, including crime writers Jussi Adler-Olsen and Karin Fossum and the poet and novelist Naja Marie Aidt, supported over the years by grants from the Danish Arts Foundation and a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literary Translation Fellowship. Semmel is also a published novelist in his own right: his 2024 debut, The Book of Losman, draws on his own experience of living with Tourette syndrome and his years as a translator based in Denmark. In this catalogue he is credited as the translator of Disgrace (2012), the second Department Q novel by Jussi Adler-Olsen.