TIP Workshop Leader Emily Wilson’s Odyssey Translation Inspires Critically Acclaimed Film Adaptation July 27, 2026

Penn classics professor Emily Wilson, who led the TIP workshop “The Iliad and the Odyssey” in the fall of 2024, is enjoying worldwide attention for her 2017 translation of the Odyssey. The translation was used in Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the Homeric epic, which was recently released to widespread critical acclaim. The film has also been a box office success, earning $263.7 million worldwide in its opening weekend.

In Wilson’s 2024 workshop, teachers from around the School District of Philadelphia delved into the broad themes of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, including migration and homecoming; violence and heroism; humans and the natural world; and fate and human agency. Participants, who teach in both primary and secondary grades, wrote curriculum modules designed to make the classic texts accessible to their students. The modules are available to teachers and the general public in the Curriculum Materials section of TIP’s website.

Wilson’s version of the Odyssey has been praised for its modern language. As the first woman to translate the nearly 2,700-year-old epic, she used language that reflected a woman’s point of view. In an Inquirer article, she remarked that she initially had limited expectations for sales of the book: “most retranslations maybe sell 1,000 copies if you’re lucky.” Wilson’s Odyssey, however, has already sold more than 1,000,000 copies. It also helped earn her a MacArthur “Genius” award in 2019. Penn Classics Chair Sheila Murnaghan noted in Penn Today that no other professor has had “the kind of broad cultural impact that Emily has for translating a work of classical literature.”