Saskia Vogel

Saskia Maria Desiree Vogel (born September 17, 1981) is an American-Swedish author, translator, and editor. Her debut novel, Permission, explores the question “How do I want to be loved?” through the story of a grieving young woman’s relationship with the dominatrix next door who’s renting a room to her oldest client. Set in coastal Los Angeles, it pursues a new understanding of the erotic and queer family-building. It was first published in English in 2019, and later in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Swedish.

Vogel's work as a writer and translator centers hidden, underrepresented, and misunderstood narratives. Central themes of her writing include language, power, and sexuality. These themes carry over into her translation work, which expands into formal experimentation with language, trauma, migration, and Indigenous histories.

Vogel’s translations and writing have appeared in publications such as Granta, Granta Sweden, the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The White Review, and The Quietus. She received an honorable mention from the Pushchart Prize in 2017 for her "Sluts", first published by The Offing. Her translation of Lina Wolff's The Polyglot Lovers (published by And Other Stories in 2019) was described by TLS as "an impeccable pairing, given Vogel’s previous form with disrobers of the misogynist regalia". In 2024, her translation of Linnea Axelsson’s Aednan was a finalist for the National Book Award (Translated Literature): “Ædnan is a layered translation from the Swedish—a resonant telling of Sámi-speaking Indigenous peoples’ lost language and migrant history, revealed by Saskia Vogel’s inspired English rendering.”

Currently residing in Berlin, Germany, Vogel has lived in Sweden, the UK, and the US.