Ellen Hinsey

Ellen Hinsey was born in 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Tufts University and a graduate degree from Université de Paris VII. For the last three decades she has lived in Europe. Hinsey has taught at the French graduate school the Ecole Polytechnique and currently teaches at Skidmore College’s Paris program. She is the international correspondent for The New England Review.

Hinsey is the author of six books and has edited and translated three others. Her current work addresses global authoritarianism.

Recent work

Hinsey's collection of essays, Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism (Telos Press, 2017), examines new forms of authoritarianism. It includes first-hand accounts and analyses of the impact of the 2012 Russian presidential election and its aftermath, the rise of populism in Poland and the constitutional crisis, Hungarian illiberalism, Václav Havel's ethical legacy and post-1989 German reconstruction. A selection of these essays first appeared in The New England Review.[1]

In 2018, The Illegal Age was published (Arc Publications, 2018). It is a philosophical-poetic investigation into the twentieth-century's legacy of totalitarianism and the rise of political illegality. Reviewer Chris Edgoose noted: "The word ‘important’ is over-used (...) but in the case of Ellen Hinsey’s The Illegal Age it seems to me the only appropriate adjective (...). It is not a book we can afford to ignore. Like Robert O. Paxton’s 2005 The Anatomy of Fascism, this is a book which approaches its subject with the absolute clarity it requires.[2]

Earlier work

Hinsey’s first book, Cities of Memory, draws on her experiences at the Berlin Wall on the weekend of November 9, 1989, as well as in Prague during the Velvet Revolution.[3] The book received the Yale Series Award and was published by Yale University Press in 1996. Her second book, The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University Press, 2002 / Bloodaxe Books, 2003), written after a family tragedy, is an exploration of ethics and renewal.

Beginning in February 2002, she traveled to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague to listen to witness sessions.[4] Her third book, Update on the Descent, addressed this experience, and is an anatomy of political violence. It was published in 2009 by Notre Dame University Press and Bloodaxe Books and has been called "an urgent, probing book."[5] Reviewing the 2017 German translation (Matthes & Seitz), literary critic Gregor Dotzauer called it an "anthropology of violence," and notes that "Er zeigt auch, wozu eine Poesie in der Lage ist, die bereit ist, es mit so ziemlich allen Furien dieser Welt aufzunehmen." [6]

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Die Welt, The Irish Times, Der Tagesspiegel, Gazeta Wyborcza, The New England Review and The Paris Review, among other publications.

Her memoir collaboration with Lithuanian dissident and poet Tomas Venclova, Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova, which examines postwar totalitarianism, dissidence and ethical choices, has been published in German, English, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Polish editions.

Hinsey is the editor and co-translator of The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova (Bloodaxe Books, 2008). She has translated The Secret Piano, by Zhu Xiao-Mei, an account of growing up under the Cultural Revolution (Amazon Crossing, 2012) and Wild Harmonies by Hélène Grimaud (Riverhead/Penguin Books, 2005).

• 2015 DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm Fellow
• 2013 Pushcart Prize nomination for "The New Opposition in Hungary"
• 2012 Pushcart Prize nomination for "Death in the Forest"
• 2007 The Stover Memorial Award / The Southwest Review
• 2001 Berlin Prize Fellowship / The American Academy in Berlin
• 2001 The Union League Civic and Arts Poetry Prize / Poetry
• 1998 Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation Fellowship, Château de Lavigny
• 1998 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award
• 1996 The Yale Younger Poets Prize
• Lannan Foundation Award

• 2011: Poetic Memory: The Forgotten Self in Plath, Howe, Hinsey, and Glück by Uta Gosmann, ISBN 978-1611470369
• 2012: (Un)concealing the Hedgehog by Paulina Ambrozy, ISBN 978-8323224839
• 2008: Another Language: Poetic Experiments in Britain and North America by Kornelia Freitag (ed.), ISBN 978-3825812102

• Ellen Hinsey, "Poland’s Constitutional Crisis and the Future Legality of Europe: A Tragedy in Five Acts", in The New England Review
• Ellen Hinsey, "The Rise of the Illiberal Elites", in TELOSscope, July 3, 2017
• Ellen Hinsey, "The Illegal Age" in The Irish Times, November 23, 2016
• Ellen Hinsey, "The Illegal Age / Das Zeitalter der Rechtswidrigkeit", in Der Tagesspiegel, January 31, 2017
• Susan Wheatley, "An Interview with Ellen Hinsey", in Poetry International, October 3, 2009
• University of Notre Dame Press
• "Update on the Last Judgment" at Poetry Foundation.org
• Review of The White Fire of Time at Critique magazine
• Author's website