Drenka Opalic Willen (born 1929) is a Serbian-American editor, publisher and translator, credited for discovering authors Günter Grass, Umberto Eco, José Saramago, Amos Oz, Wisława Szymborska and others.
B. Yehoshua, Ryszard Kapuściński, Danilo Kiš, Stanislaw Lem, Irving Howe, Edward Gorey, Wendy Wasserstein, Gary Krist, James Kelman, Breyten Breytenbach, Paul Klebnikov, Tomaž Šalamun, George Konrád, Yehudi Amichai, Cees Nooteboom, Amos Oz, Arturo Perez-Reverte and Charles Simic.
In 1990 it was published under the title Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, for which Willen hired Michael Henry Heim as a translator.
Willen bought the rights to Memorial do Convento of José Saramago in the 1980s and held on to it, although she could not sell more than 3,000 of the 5,000 printed copies of this and three other books she edited.
[7] Willen was in the process of preparing the fiftieth anniversary of the Tin Drum's appearance with a new translation by Breon Mitchell.