International Translation Day 2026 English PEN programme
English PEN’s International Translation Day programme returns with an evening of conversations between translators and their allies, in which three translators speak to figures from bookselling, publishing, and online influence, asking what we need from each other in the coming years.
ITD 2026 is hosted in person at Brixton Library, London, on Wednesday 30 September, made possible by the generous support of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS).
You can also join us for a series of workshops online, and in-person in London and Norwich, throughout September as part of our programming for ITD 2026.
International Translation Day 2026
Translators, and…?
Wednesday 30 September 2026
7.15–8.45pm (doors 7pm)
Part 1
In the first of three conversations, translator Sawad Hussain and bookseller Alison Henry discuss what they see as the biggest successes and positive shifts in the sector in recent years, and what has driven them. They’ll ask: how have developments in literary translation changed the way booksellers buy and sell books? How have transformations in the way books are promoted and consumed impacted what and how translators translate? And what would translators and booksellers need to do over the coming years to create sustainable growth in sales of literary translation?
Part 2
Next, translator Daniel Hahn and Kishani Widyaratna, Publishing Director at 4th Estate, will consider what it means to translate, what it means to publish in translation, and why it matters in our increasingly fragile and atomised world. They’ll ask: what do they respectively look for when they take on a book? How much is this about looking backwards into the market and how much is it about making the future market? Who is taking the biggest risks, and what is at stake beyond the money? And how can publishers and translators work together to make a more expansive, more viable, more saleable industry landscape?
Part 3
The final conversation will see translator Annie McDermott speak to bookseller and host of the It’s Lit in Translation podcast Evelyn Heis, discussing the importance of online influence to the future of literature in translation. They will ask: how does the appetite for reading literature relate to the appetite for reading literature in translation? Who is influencing what readers read, bookshops sell, publishers acquire, and translators translate? What do we lose and what do we gain in the quest for virality, algorithm-friendly content, and ‘overnight’ hits? And what do readers who have grown up online need from the sector?
All three conversations will be chaired by writer, translator, and publisher at Praspar Press, Jen Calleja. The event will end with all the speakers returning to the stage to take questions from the audience, followed by a networking reception.
Workshops
Sales, Hype, Ethics: Marketing and Publicising Translation
9 September 2026, 6–8pm BST, online
Many recent bestselling translated titles have been accompanied by savvy and creative marketing campaigns. But what makes a loud campaign? What makes a successful one? And what makes an ethical one?
Aimed at sector professionals, this workshop will bring together voices from marketing, publicity and art direction to explore how we reach readers, and how we reach them in the right way. Senior Designer at Pan Macmillan UK, Emma Pidsley, Managing Director at Akoya, Xenia Stafford, and Beth Farrell, a Marketing Manager at Bloomsbury, will explore the roles of design, messaging, money and strategy, and what it means to reach a readership, make a hit, and avoid homogenising a linguistic or regional culture. It will ask: when do recognisable symbols become harmful tropes? How are audiences best conceptualised? And how do you reach a market without flattening a story?
Brazilian Literature in Translation: Identities and Perspective
16 September 2026, 6–8pm BST, Dragon Hall, Norwich
With a focus on contemporary Brazilian literature but open to those interested in translating from any language, this workshop will consider the question of how much of themselves a translator should, shouldn’t, and inevitably does bring to a translation.
Led by a PEN Presents: Brazil-shortlisted translator, participants will engage in discussion and creative exercises to consider the localised and other perspectives translators bring to a project, how much they should aim to embody the author’s perspective, and how this is navigated when that perspective very much differs to their own. They will explore how much of their creative voice should come through in their translation, how they approach translating the intersecting experiences and identities present in a text, and how a translation can best convey a voice for readers in a different linguistic and cultural context.
This workshop is open to aspiring, emerging and established literary translators, and those interested in learning about the craft, with any relationship to Brazilian Portuguese or another heritage language. Participants are encouraged to bring a piece of text they are currently translating, or one they would like to translate.
This workshop is in partnership with National Centre for Writing.
International Translation Day Editorial Slam
22 September 2026, 6-8pm BST, The London Library
This participatory event sees two editors take part in an ‘editorial slam’. Based on the ‘translation slam’ model, it explores the collaborative acts of writing, translating and editing by asking Sceptre Editorial Director Ansa Khan and freelance editor Robina Pelham Burn to edit the same passage of text, translated from the Arabic, a language in which neither of them read.
During the event, they will see each other’s edits for the first time, and with the text’s translator, Nashwa Nasreldin, who will chair the conversation, discuss their choices and the rationales behind them. The audience, including translators and fellow editors, will have the chance to discuss their edits, exploring the particular challenges and opportunities of editing work in translation; how to edit well when a text is deeply rooted in cultural, linguistic, or geographical specificity; and what editors must hold onto and what they must give up.
This participatory event is in partnership with The London Library.
Speculative Ethnolinguistics: Dismantling and Reconfiguring English
Wednesday 23 September, 6-8pm BST, online
The English language bears the marks of extractivism. Even when we talk about our social relationships, finance-related metaphors often pervade our language and, by extension, the ways we connect with one another. Led by Mexican poet, translator and editor Juana Adcock, and through a series of playful writing exercises inspired by Ñuu Savi poet and human rights defender Fernanda Kookuilo'o and Tu'un Savi grammar – a gender-neutral language that uses different pronouns, depending on whether things are round, wooden or liquid – workshop participants will make up their own idioms, pronouns, grammar rules, and neologisms of care, where language itself becomes a tool for critical fabulation.
This workshop is in partnership with Wasafiri.
