Tess Lewis is a critic and translator from French and German.
Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Lutz Seiler, Montaigne, Christine Angot, and Anne Weber. She has been awarded grants from PEN USA, PEN UK, and the NEA, a Max Geilinger Translation Grant for her translation of Philippe Jaccottet, the ACFNY Translation Prize and the 2017 PEN Translation Prize for her translation of the novel Angel of Oblivion by the Austrian writer Maja Haderlap, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Her translation of Lutz Seiler’s novel Kruso was the runner-up for the 2019 Schlegel-Tieck Award.

Tess Lewis has served on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle and as Co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee. She has been an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review since 2003. Her essays and reviews have appeared in a number of journals and newspapers including Bookforum, Partisan Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Hudson Review, World Literature Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald and The American Scholar.

She was a 2021-22 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and is a 2023 scholar of note at the American Library in Paris.