Kathy Saranpa earned her BA and MA in Scandinavian at UCLA and her PhD in Germanic Languages at Yale University. She taught at the University of Oregon, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Eastern Finland before she began her career in translation. Her first full-length book translation, A Silenced Voice: The Life of Journalist Kim Wall by Ingrid and Joachim Wall, was published by Amazon Crossing in 2020 and was nominated for the Bernard Shaw Prize. Her second, Engagement by Gun-Britt Sundström, is scheduled for publication in July 2025 by Penguin/Random House. Working primarily in literary fiction and non-fiction from Swedish and Finnish to English, she lives in Joensuu, Finland.