Emily Wilson

Wilson is perhaps best known for her critically acclaimed translation of The Odyssey (2017), becoming the first woman to publish a translation of the work into English. Following a lengthy introduction, she provides a translation of Homer's work in iambic pentameter. Wilson's Odyssey was named by The New York Times as one of its 100 notable books of 2018 and it was shortlisted for the 2018 National Translation Award. In 2019, Wilson was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work bringing classical literature to new audiences.

Wilson's next works primarily focused on Rome's tragic playwright Seneca. In 2010, she translated Seneca's tragedies, with an introduction and notes, in Six Tragedies of Seneca. In 2014 she published The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca. She later noted that Seneca is an interesting subject because "he's so precise in articulating what it means to have a very, very clear vision of the good life and to be completely unable to follow through on living the good life." Wilson chose to translate Seneca's tragedies rather than his prose because translating Seneca's rhetorical style in the prose risks sounding "too silly to be impressive. It has to go very close to sounding silly, but without quite getting there."

Wilson's first book, Mocked With Death (2005), grew out of her dissertation and examines mortality in the tragic tradition: "our constant awareness of all that we will lose, are losing, have lost." The work received the Charles Bernheimer Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2003. In 2006, she was named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship (Rome Prize). Her next book, The Death of Socrates (2007), examines Socrates' execution. Wilson later reflected that she was interested in the ways and methods that Socrates would educate people, but also Socrates' death as an image: "What does it mean to live with so much integrity that you can be absolutely yourself at every moment, even when you've just poisoned yourself?"

Wilson was "shy but accomplished" in school. A graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1994 (B.A. in literae humaniores, classical literature, and philosophy), she undertook her master's degree in English literature 1500–1660 at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1996), and her Ph.D. (2001) in classical and comparative literature at Yale University.

Emily Rose Caroline Wilson (born 1971) is a British classicist and Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of five books and in 2017 became the first woman to publish a translation of Homer's Odyssey into English.