Vala Thorodds is an Iceland-born editor, publisher, poet and literary translator.

She is co-founding editor of the poetry journal Pain, managing editor of Oxford Poetry, and founding director of the literary press Partus—which operates in both Iceland and the UK, publishing original works in Icelandic and English, as well as in translation between the two.

Vala previously worked as a journalist, and as a freelance translator for magazines, museums, and private clients in Reykjavík.

Her poetry, translations, and non-fiction are published by The Guardian, Granta, BBC Radio 4, The White Review, PN Review, and the anthologies New Poetries VII (Carcanet Press) and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (Penguin Classics), among others.

In 2018 her translation of the selected poems of Kristín Ómarsdóttir, Waitress in Fall, was chosen as a poetry book of the year by both The Sunday Times and The White Review. In 2021 she received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of the novel Swanfolk by the same author, published by HarperVia (US) and Harvill Secker (UK) in 2022.