Zenia Tompkins (née Helbig) is a literary translator, editor, and agent, working primarily with contemporary Ukrainian literature. Her recent translations include Artem Chapeye’s war memoir Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns (a 2025 Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction), Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness (a 2025 EBRD Literature Prize Finalist), Chapeye’s story collection The Ukraine (short-listed for the 2025 EBRD Literature Prize), and Stanislav Aseyev’s prison memoir A Torture Camp on Paradise Street, co-translated from Russian with Nina-Murray (shortlisted for the 2024 PEN America Translation Prize). She has helped Ukrainian authors break through proverbial glass ceilings by translating the first novel written in Ukrainian to be published by a major American press (Forgottenness), as well as the first story translated from Ukrainian to be published by The New Yorker, and arranging the performance of a displaced Ukrainian poet at the 2022 Grammy Awards. Her work as a promoter and translator of contemporary Ukrainian literature has been featured by The New York Times, NPR, BBC, The Washington Post, Public Radio International, The Wall Street Journal, and Poets & Writers Magazine, among others.

Zenia was trained as an Islamicist and Iran scholar, and holds graduate degrees in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and Religious Studies from the University of Virginia. She reads more or less fluently in seven languages and three scripts, has studied a few more languages beyond that, and has lived in countries as diverse as Guatemala, France, Tajikistan, and the Dominican Republic. Her extensive travel includes off-the-beaten-path spots like Yemen, Iran, Bulgaria, central India, and Panama, all of which inform her translations. Born and raised in the US, Zenia grew up bilingual, relearning contemporary Ukrainian in her late thirties, and has been a voracious reader of literature in translation since college.

Zenia began translating from Ukrainian ten years ago on a lark, inspired by a former professor of Arabic who translated Naguib Mahfouz in his spare time, and founded TAULT as both an agency and translator collective in 2019, when full-length Ukrainian prose books were being published in English at a rate of one-to-two a year. Prior to the invasion of 2022, she co-translated a number of books with emerging translators to help them obtain their first book contracts, and did extensive pro bono work to help establish a Ukrainian-to-English translation infrastructure, including: advising the Ukrainian Book Institute (UBI) under Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture on the establishment of its first translation grant program, supervising the translation of UBI’s first full-length Frankfurt Book Catalog with a team of a dozen literary translators, and serving as an advisor to a plethora of Ukrainian authors and publishers hoping to have their books published in the US or UK. Additionally, she translated countless book samples for Ukrainian publishers at steeply discounted rates, as well as facilitating and supervising samples undertaken by other translators in the TAULT collective.

In late 2023, Zenia took an unexpected and indefinite leave from all things Ukrainian, so that both she and her family could recover from the inordinate hours she had been devoting to Ukrainian literature since 2018. She is currently choosing individual books for both translation and representation in the English-speaking world, to include upmarket, literary, and experimental fiction, as well as nonfiction for general readership. The books she is choosing reflect, but are not limited to, her current intellectual interests, which include the fall-of-empire period in Europe, the resultant outward trickle effects of nationalism, how languages are defined and bleed into one another, the fickle and malleable nature of political identity, re-narrations of history, and self-justifications for political complacency. She’s also on a hunt for a good upmarket horror novel to translate, preferably by a female author.

Zenia lives in Virginia with her husband and three children, where she became an avid gardener during her leave from Ukrainian literature. During her gardening, Zenia came to terms with the extent of her post-invasion dislike for all forms of nationalism, to include Ukrainian nationalism. Her garden is no longer thriving since her return to translation.