Linda Asher moved into Belnord apartment 505 in 1963 with her husband Aaron Asher and young daughter Rachel. Abigail was born in 1964.
As longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker (1981-1997) Linda worked with Haruki Murakami, Louise Erdrich, Samuel Beckett, A.S. Byatt and numerous others. As a renowned translator from French to English she translated works by Milan Kundera, Honoré de Balzac, Yasmina Reza, Georges Simenon, Victor Hugo, and others.
She was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic (a lifetime achievement for contributing to arts and literature) and won many awards including ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for Testaments Betrayed, with Milan Kundera (1996), Scott Moncrieff Prizefor Ignorance (2003), French-American Foundation/Florence Gould Translation Prize: Nonfiction for The Curtain (2008), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation (lifetime achievement) in 2020.
In an in-depth interview with editorial designer Peter Biľak Linda discussed her reading, “For a translator, all reading is of course nourishing and essential for a working lexicon of dictions, experience and information. When I am engaged in a particular book project, I often read around it widely and intensively—for the period, for the world it comes from, or perhaps to broaden my sense of the author’s own range of reference and culture. And of course that’s a wonderful feature of, a bonus in, the profession of translator—you are regularly obliged to enter a fresh world and learn to put it into words.”
A lovely tribute from Seven Stories:
“A friend of Seven Stories, the discerning and hugely talented French translator Linda Asher, died last Tuesday. Linda Asher (November 27, 1932 – September 15, 2026) helped us bring several astonishing and challenging novels into superlative English editions—Yasmina Reza’s Babylon, the marvelous late 19th and early 20th century French bestseller Jean-Marie Déguignet’s Memoirs of a Breton Peasant, and Martin Winckler’s (pseudonym for Marc Zaffran) The Case of Doctor Sachs. Linda also translated Balzac, Simenon, Victor Hugo, Kundera and others. In her previous life as longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker, she worked with Murakami, Louise Erdrich, Beckett and A.S. Byatt among others. She will be missed.”
In 1956 Linda married Aaron Asher, an “editor of literary heavyweights,” said the New York Times. Aaron worked with Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Erica Jong, Erich Fromm, Frank Conroy, Charles Rosen, and President Lyndon B. Johnson, among others. The Times added that he was “noted for his distinguished list of authors, tweedy attire and accomplished renditions of Bach preludes and fugues on the piano.” He was routinely brought in by publishers to revive their flagging trade-book divisions.
In the interview with Peter Biľak Linda says that Aaron had been Kundera’s “American editor (and sometimes translator) for years. I came to know Kundera, and as a friend I occasionally translated short French texts, articles and speeches for him. His first books after leaving Czechoslovakia were still written in Czech, though not published there. But afterwards he began to write and publish in French, and in 1985, after some experience together, he asked me to undertake the translation of his first major French work, The Art of the Novel, and I’ve done several more since then. I mention Aaron Asher because he was exactly that same kind of editor: enormously meticulous, demanding, funny. Both men were famous for their scrupulous attention to detail. And I responded happily to their combined tough requirements. They hardened my own standards.”
