Born in New York City, Frisch now lives in Princeton, New Jersey. She received a Ph.D. in Germanic languages and literature from Princeton University in 1981 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Speculations of the origin of language and German Romanticism."[3] She taught at Bucknell University and Columbia University (where she was Executive Editor of Germanic Review), then served as Chair of the Bi-College German Department at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges until turning to translation full-time in the mid-1990s. In addition to her translation work, she co-directs international translation workshops with Karen Nölle,[4] and serves on several juries to award translation prizes, e.g., the Kurt and Helen Wolff Translation Prize.[5]
Winner, Aldo and Jeanne Scalgione Prize, 2005-2006 - for Kafka: The Decisive Years.[8]
Longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize, the National Book Critics Circles Awards, and the National Translation Award.
Publications
Frisch has written and lectured widely on themes pertaining to literature, cinema, and exile. Her book, The Lure of the Linguistic, was published by Holmes & Meier in 2004.
Selected Book Translations
Jan Mohnhaupt, The Zookeepers’ War: The Incredible True Story of an Animal Arms Race (Simon & Schuster, 2019).
Helmuth James von Moltke and Freya von Moltke, Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence Between Helmuth and Freya von Moltke 1944-45. Ed. Helmuth Caspar von Moltke, Johannes von Moltke, and Dorothea von Moltke (NYRB Classics, 2019).
