Jennifer Croft, Anton Hur, Lily Meyer and Bruna Dantas Lobato on Their Debut Novels

By many measures, Bruna Dantas Lobato is quite the literary star. At 33, the Brazilian American has published a cascade of translations, both fiction and nonfiction, from Portuguese to English, and last year won the National Book Award for translated literature.

But one story, she said, was missing from her bibliography: her own. With her debut novel, “Blue Light Hours,” centered on a Brazilian student who sees her close relationship with her mother reduced to a computer screen when she moves to New England for college, she is finally closing that gap. (The book is due out in October, from Grove Atlantic.)

“I wanted to write the kind of novel I hadn’t found yet,” she said. Knowing two languages, she added, allowed her to “play with different styles and genres to tell that story.”

She isn’t alone. A growing cohort of translators is expanding the field and making the leap to publishing as authors themselves: Jennifer Croft, best known for translating the Nobel Prize-winning Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, published “The Extinction of Irena Rey” in March; “Short War,” by the translator Lily Meyer, followed in April; and “Toward Eternity,” by the Seoul-based translator Anton Hur, came out earlier this month.

None see their translation work as divorced from their creative practice, but as seminal to shaping their voices as writers. K.E. Semmel, a translator from Danish whose debut novel, “The Book of Losman,” is forthcoming in October, argued in an essay in The Millions that working as a translator was an important training ground for his writing.

“It’s part of a process of cross-pollination,” Croft said. “It’s perfectly normal for translators to hone their craft by writing books, and I’m happy that translators are also getting to tell their own stories.”

The reverse has certainly been true: Authors as varied as Cicero, Tobias Smollett and Gustave Flaubert also rose to the challenge of translation work, as did Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Haruki Murakami has said that translating “The Great Gatsby” into Japanese was a primary influence on his writing, and one rumor — among many — pins Elena Ferrante’s true identity on the translator Anita Raja.

“When you’re working with so many different voices and styles, eventually you find yourself asking: ‘What is my voice?’” said Saskia Vogel, a Berlin-based translator whose debut novel, “Permission,” was published in 2019.

In 2016, the translator Idra Novey answered that question with her fiction debut “Ways to Disappear,” a novel about a translator, and with two more novels since. The veteran translator Peter Constantine made his contribution with “The Purchased Bride,” published last year. Inspired by his grandmother’s life, the book tells the story of a young woman fleeing the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

And Jeremy Tiang, a prolific translator from the Chinese and a playwright, published the short collection “It Never Rains on National Day” in 2015 and the novel “State of Emergency” in 2018.

A particularly transformative boost to prominence for translators occurred in 2021, when Croft helped lead a successful campaign to have translators’ names — long buried on the copyright pages inside translated books — featured on the covers. The attendant name recognition may have further facilitated segues to publishing their own writing.

Croft’s views on translation could be a manifesto for the persistent thrum of firsthand experience underlying her copiously researched, densely plotted novel about the disappearance of a world-famous Polish novelist and the gradual unraveling of a tight-knit group of translators as they try to find her.

“I feel pretty strongly,” she said, “that to successfully translate a language you have to have lived in the country where that language is from.”

Croft began to wade into language study with high school Russian courses. By age 15, she had run through the available offerings and enrolled in college, eventually branching out to Ukrainian, then Polish. She has lived in Poland and Argentina, translated a range of Spanish-language authors, and originally wrote “Homesick,” an autobiographical novella published in 2019, in Spanish.

Among the many layers to her novel — meta, mythic, mystical and Colonel-Mustard-in-the-Parlor — is the palpable presence of Bialowieza, one of the last primeval forests in Europe, bordered on one side by a volatile Belarus and on others by ongoing threats to an ancient ecosystem, its mutability an ongoing allegory for translation.

Croft, Hur, Dantas Lobato, and Meyer all came of literary age during the sociopolitical shifts still informing the American translation landscape after 9/11, pledging by dint of their career choices a certain allegiance to cross-national dialogue and understanding.

“Translation,” Hur said, “asks what the role of literature is in society and culture.”

An opponent of the conservative South Korean government, Hur is a founding member of the translation collective Smoking Tigers, which champions innovative Korean literature, and a vocal critic of the longstanding primacy of Eurocentric translated literature.

Those convictions are full-bore in “Toward Eternity.” A love story spanning multiple millenniums, life-forms and variations on immortality, the book posits Victorian poetry as a weapon of empire, insists on nature’s resilience in the face of genocide and manipulates prose into something like a new language.

Because Hur, who is gay, was forced to hide his sexuality growing up, “code switching was always there,” he said. Though now embarked on two new novels, he stresses translation’s priority for him. “I still consider myself a translator first and foremost,” he said. “It’s much cooler than being a writer. It’s such a complicated, complex skill.”

Like translation, “Toward Eternity” recognizes both the building and burning of bridges. One reason Hur said he set the novel partly in a post-apartheid South Africa is the symbolic significance it holds for a bifurcated Korean Peninsula. “We’re a country that has remained broken, divided into North and South,” he said. “Though South Africa isn’t perfect, it holds a kind of utopian quality for us.”

Meyer’s “Short War” explores a different dystopia, rifling back five decades to the United States’ complicity in ushering in the brutal rule of Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet. Before she traveled there as a high school exchange student in 2008, she said, “I knew that the Pinochet regime had lasted 17 years, but not that the United States had helped make it possible. I was so mortified and angry.”

Her notion for “Short War” grew out of her determination to turn those revelations into a novel, and, in the course of delving into her research in Spanish, she became a translator. “Translation makes a lot of sense for me as a writer,” she said. “The skills are the same. You have to care about every sentence, you have to be able to play with words, you have to understand your context — except that translation is more collaborative.”

Dantas Lobato’s trajectory was Meyer’s in reverse. Her proficiency in Portuguese and English helped her win a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy, then Bennington College, followed by an M.F.A. in creative writing at N.Y.U.

“Being bilingual has made me a writer,” she said. “I see stories in between the lines of my life.”

As she wrote her novel, Dantas Lobato said, she grappled with what she realized was her earliest role as a translator. “My parents were divorced,” she explained, “and I had to translate between them.”

As the unnamed protagonist of “Blue Light Hours” struggles to translate her old self into someone new, in a new country and a new language, she watches the way memories continue to grip her mother as tightly as the telenovela tragedies flickering in the apartment behind her.

The translator Samantha Schnee pointed out that Dantas Lobato’s first published translation was with Words Without Borders, the digital magazine Schnee founded in 2003 that has since featured the collaborative work of 4,600 writers and translators in 140 languages.

From her vantage point, Schnee said, the pivot to fiction by translators like Dantas Lobato, Croft, Hur and Meyer “is just the tip of the iceberg as translators feel more and more empowered.”

Recently, Schnee said, she came across a box containing pages of a novella she wrote to fulfill her M.F.A. in creative writing at The New School two decades ago.

She plans to expand it into a novel.