Sarah Elizabeth Ruden is an American writer of poetry, essays, translations of Classic literature, and popularizations of Biblical philology, religious criticism and interpretation.^[1][2]

Sarah Ruden was born in Ohio in 1962 and raised in the United Methodist Church.^[3] She holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University.^[4]

In addition to her academic appointments, Ruden has worked as a medical editor, a contributor to American periodicals,^[5] and a stringer for the South African investigative magazine noseweek.^[6]

Ruden became an activist Quaker during her ten years spent in post-apartheid South Africa, where she was a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project.^[7][8] Both before and after her return to the United States in 2005, Ruden has engaged in ecumenical outreach and published a number of articles and essays, mainly in conservative publications.^[9][10]

She was a lecturer in Classics at the University of Cape Town. In 2016, she was awarded a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete her translation of The Confessions of Augustine (2017).^[11]

She is an advocate for the popularization of ancient texts.^[12]

Ruden has been a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania since 2018.^[13]

In 2010, Ruden was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to fund her translation of the Oresteia of Aeschylus.^[14] She won a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete her translation of The Confessions of Augustine in 2016.^[15] Her translation of the Gospels was funded in part by a Robert B. Silvers Grant for Work in Progress in 2019.^[16]

Ruden has been a “convinced Friend,” or Quaker convert, since 1992. Her Quakerism informs her translation methodology.^[17][18][19]