Julia Sanches was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and has lived in the United States, Mexico, Switzerland, Scotland, and Spain. She holds a BA in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. After a stint at a New York literary agency, she settled in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2017, where she now works as a full-time translator.
She translates literature from Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish into English. Her bibliography includes novels by Eva Baltasar, Susana Moreira Marques, Mariana Oliver, and Montserrat Roig, plus shorter pieces in Granta, Tin House, Guernica, and Words Without Borders. Her translations have been shortlisted or longlisted for the International Booker, the PEN Translation Prize, and the Cercador Prize. She won the PEN Translation Prize in 2022 for Mariana Oliver's Migratory Birds and served as a judge for the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature.
She is a founding member of Cedilla & Co., a collective working to widen the range of international literature in English, and chair of the Translators Group of the Authors Guild. She also sits on the Literary Translators Division of the National Writers Union. In 2026 she was the Princeton Translator-in-Residence.
For a new reader, Boulder is a strong first pick. Eva Baltasar's novel tracks a woman nicknamed Boulder as she and her partner Samsa settle in Reykjavík and face the question of whether to have a child. Sanches's English translation was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, and the novel itself won the 2020 Òmnium Prize in Catalan. The prose is taut and lyrical, and the pull between freedom and intimacy never lets up.
