They Translated the Books of Others. Now They’re Writing Their Own.

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.