Workshop Leader Emily Wilson’s Odyssey Translation in the News January 15, 2025 – Posted in: Uncategorized

Penn Professor and TIP Workshop Leader Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey, made the news recently when film director Christopher Nolan announced that he is working on an adaptation of the classic. Her 2017 version of the epic has been acclaimed as “a revelation” and “radically contemporary” by critics. Many hope he will use Wilson’s translation as a starting point for the film’s screenplay.

Wilson also completed a translation of Homer’s Iliad in 2023. She brought these works to School District of Philadelphia teachers in her fall 2024 TIP workshop “The Iliad and the Odyssey.” The Eleven teachers enrolled in the workshop wrote lesson plans that will make the works accessible to their students—and hopefully pique their interest in classical writing.

The buzz around Wilson’s translation—and its relationship to Nolan’s film—was profiled in a recent Inquirer article. The Oppenheimer director is developing the screenplay with partner and collaborator Emma Thomas. The projected release date of the film is July 2026, and the cast will include Matt Damon, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, and Lupita Nyong’o, among others.