Kareem Abdulrahman is a translator and journalist. He obtained his MA in Journalism from the University of Westminster and worked for over eight years with the BBC. In 2013, he was awarded a place on the British Centre for Literary Translation’s prestigious mentorship programme. He lives in London.
Nasrin Alavi is the author of We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs (Portobello Books, 2005), which was translated into several languages. She has contributed to Nader Hashemi & Danny Postel eds., The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Freedom in Iran (Melville House, 2011). Her writing has also been published in the Financial Times Magazine, the Times, the Independent, Private Eye, La Vanguardia (Spain), and Das Parlament (Germany); and she has written extensively for Germany’s Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung.
Nick Allen is a British journalist who lived in Russia, where he covered the conflict in Chechnya and worked for The Moscow Times. He has also worked for The Daily Telegraph and the German Press Agency dpa. He went on to work for dpa in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he completed a two-year book project on the conflict there. He has also translated for the literary journal, Glas New Russian Writing.
Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He studied at the University of Melbourn and taught there, in the French programme, from 1995 to 2008. He is now teaching at the University of Western Sydney, where he is a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. As well as translating books by Roberto Bolano and Cesar Aira, he has published a critical study – Poetry and Cosmology: Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge – and a collection of poems – Cut Lunch.
John Angliss is a Turkish-English translator living in Ankara, Turkey. He has worked on a wide range of literary and technical translation including authors Hasan Ali Toptaş, Ahmet Ümit and Hakan Günday. He won the British Council Turkey Young Translator Prize in 2011.
Sarah Ardizzone has translated forty-something titles from the French, winning several awards – including the Scott-Moncrieff Prize for Just Like Tomorrow by Faïza Guene. She has a special interest in translating sharp dialogue, urban and migrant slang, and in what the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou calls “a world literature in French”. Sarah appears regularly on the book festival and live literature circuit, and curates educational programmes around translation – including Translation Nation, Translators in Schools, The Spectacular Translation Machine and The Big Translate.
Ian Barnett has lived in Buenos Aires since 1991, translating and promoting many Argentinian and other South American writers. He collaborates closely with Carlos Gamerro and has already translated Gamerro’s novels The Islands and An Open Secret. Reviews of The Islands often made a point of praising his inventive, athletic ‘feat of translation’ (the Observer). Barnett was chosen by the Argentinian government to translate an anthology of ‘disappeared’ authors, presented at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair, where Argentina was the Guest of Honour.
Francesca Barrie is a translator from French and Italian. She studied at Oxford University and went on to complete an MA in French at University College London.
Having lived and worked as a translator in Paris, Francesca was shortlisted for the Institut Françis’s Young Translator of the Year prize. Her translation of Tiphaine Rivière’s Notes on a Thesis, published by Jonathan Cape in 2016, received rave reviews.
Charlotte Barslund has translated several Norwegian and Danish writers, including Jo Nesbø and Karin Fossum. Her translation of Per Petterson’s I Curse The River of Time was shortlisted for the Independent 2011 Foreign Fiction award, and that of Carsten Jensen’s We, the Drowned was nominated for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award.
Polly Barton is a translator of Japanese literature and non-fiction, currently based in Bristol. She has translated short stories for Words Without Borders, The White Review and GRANTA. Her full-length translations include Friendship for Grown-ups by Naocola Yamazaki and Mikumari by Misumi Kubo (both Strangers Press) and Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press). After being awarded the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, she is currently working on a non-fiction book entitled Fifty Sounds.
Anthea Bell was born in Suffolk, England, and is the daughter of writer Adrian Bell. She was educated at the University of Oxford (Somerville College) and has worked for many years as a freelance translator, mainly from French and German, also serving three terms on the committee of the UK Translators’ Association, and nine years on the jury panel of the Schlegel-Tieck German translation prize. She was appointed OBE in the New Year Honours List 2010. Her translations include W. G. Sebold’s Austerlitz, which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2002. She was awarded the Federal German Verdiestkreuz (Cross of Merit) in 2015.
David Bellos, a Professor of French and Comparative Literature, has translated many of Kadare’s novels and was awarded the Man Booker Translator’s Prize in 2005. Bellos has written a number of award-winning literary biographies and an introduction to translation studies, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (2011).
Gregor Benton is professor emeritus at Cardiff University. He has published books on Chinese Communism, dissent in China, and Chinese communities outside China. His Mountain Fires (1992) and New Fourth Army (1999) won several awards, including the Association of Asian Studies’ best book on modern China. He has translated scholarly books from German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French, and Chinese. He has taught Chinese Studies in Leeds, Amsterdam, Cardiff, Kuala Lumpur, and Barcelona.
You can read more about Hu Feng’s Prison Years and Hu Feng himself in Gregor Benton’s PEN Atlas dispatch.
Translator and author Susan Bernofsky, former Chair of the Translation Committee of the PEN American Center, teaches literary translation in the School of the Arts MFA Program in Writing at Columbia University.
She has translated over twenty books, including seven by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation.
Her prizes and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014, the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the 2012 Herman Hesse Translation Prize. She has also received fellowships from the NEH, the NEA, the PEN Translation Fund, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
She blogs about translation at: www.translationista.net
Anthony Berris was born in the UK and has lived in Israel for most of his life, working as a teacher and freelance translator.
Philip Boehm is the author of more than two dozen translations of novels and plays by German and Polish writers, including Nobelist Herta Müller, Christoph Hein, Bertolt Brecht and Stefan Chwin. Non-fiction translations include A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous and Words to Outlive Us, a collection of eyewitness accounts from the Warsaw ghetto. For his work as a translator he has received numerous awards, including the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize (UK), the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize (US), and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also works as a playwright and theatre director, and is the Founding Artistic Director of Upstream Theatre in St. Louis.
Marilyn Booth has worked in various education institutions, including the University of Edinburgh, where she was the Iraq Professor of Arabic Studies, New York University Abu Dhabi as Senior Humanities Research Fellow and the University of Oxford as an adviser for students of Magdalen College pursuing degrees in Arabic.
In addition to her research publications on Arabic literature, gender politics in Egypt, auto/biography and translation studies, she has been a prolific translator of contemporary Arabic fiction.
Clarissa Botsford studied Italian at Cambridge and Comparative Education in London before moving to Rome, Italy. She has worked in the fields of teaching, intercultural education and publishing and is also a musician. She currently teaches English and Translation Studies at Rome University and translates contemporary Italian fiction and poetry.
David Brookshaw was born in London. He is Professor of Luso-Brazilian Studies at Bristol University, UK, with a specialist interest in postcolonial literatures in Portuguese, comparative literature,and literary translation. He has translated a number of books by Mia Couto, including Sleepwalking Land and A River Called Time. He has also compiled an anthology of stories by the Portuguese writer José Rodrigues Miguéis, The Polyhedric Mirror: Tales of American Life, as well as translating stories of immigrant life in North America by the Portuguese/Azorean/New England writer Onésimo Almeida, Tales from the Tenth Island.
Jamie Bulloch is a historian and has been working as a professional translator from German since 2001. After studying Modern Languages at Bristol University, he obtained an MA in Central European History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), and followed up with a PhD in interwar Austrian history. He taught German language and Central European History at SSEES, UCL, King’s College London and Warwick University, and has written a book on Karl Renner in the ‘Makers of the Modern World’ series. He was runner-up in the 2014 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translation of Sea of Ink.
Jan Butler lived and worked as a translator in Moscow for thirteen years, from 1974-1987, specialising in translations of twentieth-century Russian fiction and particularly, short stories and novellas by Yuri Olesha, Vasily Belov, Alexander Gryn, Fazil Iskander, Yuri Nagibin, Yuri Reuthei, Viktoria Tokareva, Magarita Shaginyan, poems and articles by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Armenian poet Georg Emin and Georgian novelist Nodar Dumbadze. She also translated city guides of Moscow, Lvov, Vilnius, Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, a history of Russian folk art and a great many books for children. Her translations also appeared in the monthly journal Soviet Literarture and the periodical of the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church.
James Byrne is the editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine and has published poetry collections, Passages of Time and Blood / Sugar. He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, and the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees. He helped to organize the ‘World Poets’ Tour’ for the Poetry Translation Centre at SOAS, London, in 2004. In 2008 he won the Treci Trg poetry prize in Serbia. Since 2006 James has taught regular Wolf Workshops, which have helped many students with first book and pamphlet publications.
Nick Caistor has translated more than thirty books by Spanish and Latin American authors. As Latin American editor of the magazine Index on Censorship, he edited the English version of Argentina’s report on the thousands of disappeared, NUNCA MAS, and has translated and written about many human rights problems in Latin America.
From Spain, he has translated novels by Juan Marse and Eduardo Mendoza which examine the effects of the Civil War; in 2007 he won the Valle-Inclan translation prize for his translation of The Sleeping Voice, a novel based on the experiences of Republican women prisoners in the Franco period.
Euan Cameron has translated over two dozen books from the French, including works by Julien Green, Paul Morand, François Bizot, Pierre Péju, Jean-Paul Kauffmann, Philippe Claudel and Jean-Michel Guenassia, as well as major biographies of Marcel Proust and Irène Némirovsky. He was formerly a publisher at Bodley Head, Random House and Harvill Secker.
Uk writer Simon Carnell is the author of Hare (Reaktion), a cultural study of human-animal relationships, and the co-translator of two books by the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli. His poems have appeared most recently in London Review of Books, Poetry London, and the Wallace Stevens Journal. He has visited Mexico annually for the past fifteen years, and written on english literary travellers to Mexico between the wars in Erica Segre (ed.) Ghosts of the revolution in mexican literature and visual culture. His translations and co-translations of Italian poetry have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, and in the anthologies the Faber Book of 20th Century Italian Poets and Canone Inverso.
Martin Chalmers grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, and after many years in Birmingham and London now lives in Rixdorf in Berlin. He studied history at the universities of Glasgow, Birmingham and Bochum. Martin Chalmers has translated many leading German-language authors into English. His book translations include Europe, Europe and The Silences of Hammerstein by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Passport (Der Mensch ist ein grosser Fasan auf der Welt) by Herta Müller and The Orphanage by Hubert Fichte. He edited and translated a selection of stories by Erich Fried under the title Children and Fools and edited Beneath Black Stars, a volume of contemporary Austrian fiction.
Other translations include Summer Resort by Esther Kinsky and Brussels, the Gentle Monster or the Disenfranchisement of Europe by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In 2004 Martin Chalmers was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for The Lesser Evil, his translation of the post-1945 Diaries of Victor Klemperer.
Tom Cheesman was born in Liverpool and grew up in County Durham. He is a senior lecturer in German at Swansea University, a volunteer with the Swansea Bay Asylum Seekers Support Group, and a trustee of the charities DPIA (Displaced People in Action) and Croeso. He lived in Germany and France before settling in Swansea in 1990. He helped edit Home and Away: Diaspora Voices (Index on Censorship 2002).
Jessica Cohen is a freelance translator based in Denver. Born in England and raised in Jerusalem, she translates contemporary Israeli fiction, nonfiction and poetry, as well as commercial material from and into Hebrew. Her translations have been published by Metropolitan Books, Farrar Straus and Giroux, Knopf, and The Toby Press. Her shorter translations have appeared in The New York Times, Tablet Magazine, Newsweek International and elsewhere.
Elliott Colla is a prominent translator of modern Arabic fiction, including novels by Ibrahim al-Koni, Ibrahim Aslan and Idris Ali. He currently teaches Arabic literature at Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
Georgina Collins is a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow. She researches the translation of Francophone postcolonial literature and also works as a freelance translator. Georgina also published the first anthology of Francophone African women’s poetry, The Other Half of History, featuring her own translations into English.
David Colmer has translated more than 50 books from the Dutch: novels, children’s literature, and poetry. He has won a number of translation prizes, including the 2009 Biennial NSW Premier and PEN Translation Prize for his body of work. In 2010 his translation of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and in 2013 he won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his translation of Bakker’s The Detour.
Charlotte Coombe is a British translator based between Marrakesh and the UK, working from French and Spanish into English. Her translation of Abnousse Shalmani’s Khomeini, Sade and Me (2016) won a PEN Translates award in 2015 and is her second title with World Editions. After a decade translating creative texts in gastronomy, the arts, travel and tourism, lifestyle, fashion and advertising, her love of literature drew her to literary translation, with a particular focus on women’s writing.
Her work is published online by Palabras Errantes, and she is currently translating a collection of short stories by the Mexican author Rosamaría Roffiel (seeking a UK publisher).
Rebecca Copeland received her Ph.D. in Japanese Literature from Columbia University in 1986. This study was subsequently published as The Sound of the Wind: The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo (1992.) Dr. Copeland’s study of Meiji women writers, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan was published in 2000 and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2001. Her edited volume Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing was published in 2006. Copeland co-edited a collection of essays concerning the relationship between women writers and their fathers – both biological and cultural – with Dr. Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen of the University of Michigan, The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father (2001) and a collection of translations, Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan with Dr. Melek Ortabasi of Hamilton College (2006). Grotesque, Copeland’s translation of a Kirino Natsuo title, was published in 2007.
Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa and José Saramago. In 2008 she won the PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize for her version of Eça de Queíroz’s masterpiece The Maias. She was awarded the Permio Valle Inclán in 2010 for her translation of Bernardo Atxaga’s The Accordionist’s Son.
Linda Coverdale is an award-winning translator. She has translated many classic works of modern French literature into English, including Roland Barthes, Emmanuel Carrere, Marie Darrieussecq, Annie Ernaux, Hervé Guibert, Sébastien Japrisot, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Phiippe Labro, Yann Queffélec, Jorge Semprun and Patrick Volodine.
John Cullen is the translator of numerous books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report and Yasmina Reza’s Happy Are the Happy.
Howard Curtis is one of the top translators working in the UK. He translates from French, Spanish and Italian, and many of his translations have been awarded or shortlisted for translation prizes.
Humphrey Davies holds a PhD in Near East Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He has spent 36 years working and living in the Arab world – 20 of these in Egypt, with lengthy periods in Palestine, Sudan and Tunisia. He works out of Arabic (both formal and four dialects: Egyptian Arabic, Sudanese, Tunisian and Palestinian).
His translations include Ala’ Al-Aswani’s The Yacoubian Building, Naguib Mahfouz’s Thebes at War and Sayed Ragab’s ‘El Far’ (‘Rat’) – a short story in Egyptian Arabic, published in Banipal Magazine (Summer 2002)
In addition to his translation work, he has worked for the Ford Foundation in Cairo and Khartoum; for the Save the Children Federation; and for Oxford University Press. He is based in Cairo.
Alexander Dawe studied French and Classical Guitar Performance at Oberlin College and Conservatory. He has translated several contemporary Turkish novels, including Endgame by Ahmet Altan. In collaboration with Maureen Freely, he has translated A Useless Man by Sait Faik Abasiyanik, The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanipar and The Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali. In 2010, he received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant to translate the short stories of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. He lives and works in Turkey, on the Prince Islands Archipelago, in the sea of Marmara near Istanbul.
Sarah Death has translated works by many Swedish authors including Kerstin Ekman, Sven Lindqvist, Steve Sem-Sandberg, children’s writer Astrid Lindgren and classic crime writer Per Wahlöö. She has twice won the triennial George Bernard Shaw Prize for translation from Swedish, and was awarded the Swedish Academy’s Translation Prize in 2008. She has also translated Norwegian author Linn Ullman. She has been editor of the magazine Swedish Book Review since 2003.
Malcolm DeBevoise’s translations from the French and Italian, including more than thirty works in every branch of scholarship, have been widely praised. He lives in New Orleans.
Michelle Deeter has been translating and interpreting since 2007. She holds a BA in International Relations and an MA in Translation and Interpreting. She completed a translation fellowship at the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2012 and an interpreting internship at the United Nations office in Vienna, Austria in 2013.
Katy Derbyshire, originally from London, has lived in Berlin for twenty years. She translates contemporary German writers including Inka Parei, Dorothee Elmiger, Simon Urban, Annett Gröschner and Christa Wolf. Her translation of Clemens Meyer’s Die Nacht, die Lichter was published as All the Lights by And Other Stories in 2011. She occasionally teaches translation and also co-hosts a monthly translation lab and the bi-monthly Dead Ladies Show.
Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman is professor of English at Khulna University. He is a translator, a theatre and performance studies scholar and a literary and cultural theory enthusiast. He has translated a number of works including Brecht’s Exception and the Rule and edited a number of collections including Norway-er Gwalpa, an anthology of translated stories from Norway.
Arifa Ghani Rahman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. She also teaches online, at Rivier University in New Hampshire, USA, from Bangladesh. Rahman freelances as an editor and translator, with translations of several short stories, a book of poetry and a novel to her credit.
Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English. Thirty-one of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award and the winner of the Muse India translation award (2013). He was born and grew up in Kolkata, and lives and writes in New Delhi.
Marzia Rahman is a freelance writer with an MA in English Literature from the University of Dhaka. Her articles, translations and book reviews have been published in major Bangladeshi newspapers including The Daily Star and The Independent. She received the Child Sight Journalist Fellowship’s Best Report award in 2008 and is currently at work on her first novel.
Masrufa Ayesha Nusrat is a literary translator who teaches English at the East West University in Dhaka. Nusrat recently published Celebration & Other Stories, a collection of her own translations of short stories by contemporary women writers of Bangladesh.
Mohammad Mahmudul Haque is a Bangladeshi academic and translator currently teaching Applied Linguistics and ELT at BRAC University. A two-time recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, Haque taught at Syracuse University and the Washington English Centre in the US. Haque was also a member of the group that translated Shaheen Akhter’s short story ‘Bhalobashar Poridhi/The Limits of Love,’ published online by Commonwealth Writers.
Mohammad Shafiqul Islam is Assistant Professor of English at the Shahjalal University of Science and Technology in Sylhet, Bangladesh. He is currently pursuing doctoral studies under the Department of English at Assam University in India. An anthology of short stories translated by Islam, titled Humayun Ahmed: Selected Short Stories (Anyaprokash), was launched in 2016. He is currently at work on translating The Letters of Kazi Nazrul Islam.
Pushpita Alam is the managing editor of Bengal Lights Books and in charge of the Dhaka Translation Center, both based at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. Alam’s non-fiction translations have been published in several newspapers and magazines in Bangladesh. She is currently translating a novel as part of the Center’s Library of Bangladesh series.
Syeda Nur-E-Royhan has both an Honours and Masters degree in English Literature from the University of Dhaka. She is now working full-time as a professional freelance translator and editor. Her translations of classic Bengali poems into English have been published by several national dailies and magazines. She also translated poems for Bangladesh Betar, the national radio station. Nur-E-Royhan aims to pursue higher studies in comparative literature.
Lisa Dillman teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She has translated a number of Spanish and Latin American writers. Some of her recent translations include Rain Over Madrid; August, October; and Death of a Horse, by Andrés Barba, and Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera.
Jim Dingley was born in Leeds in 1942. The school he attended was one of the first in the UK to start teaching Russian in the aftermath of the launch of the first Soviet satellite. He continued his studies of Russian and other Slavonic languages at Cambridge in the early 1960s. After a brief stint working in the Netherlands and then in the British Museum Library (now the British Library), he worked in the University of Reading and then in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He retired in 2003 and has never looked back. His interest in Belarus and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania began in 1966 and he is now quite literally married to the region — his wife, Ella, is a native Belarusian speaker from Miensk; without her help and support the translation of Natalka Babina’s book would have taken much longer and would have been much poorer.
Maura Dooley was born in Truro, grew up in Bristol, worked for some years in Yorkshire, and has lived in London for the past 25 years. She is a freelance writer and lectures at Goldsmiths’ College. She edited Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets (1997) and The Honey Gatherers: A Book of Love Poems (2002) for Bloodaxe, and How Novelists Work (2000) for Seren. Her selection, Sound Barrier: Poems 1982-2002, was published by Bloodaxe in 2002, drawing on collections including Explaining Magnetism (1991) and Kissing a Bone (1996), both Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Kissing a Bone and her later collection Life Under Water, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2008, were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her poem ‘Cleaning Jim Dine’s Heart’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2015, and is included in her latest collection, The Silvering, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was published by Bloodaxe in March 2016. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2016. Her translation (with Elhum Shakerifar) of Azita Ghahreman’s Negative of a Group Photograph.
Michael Duke received his doctorate in Chinese from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1975. After thirty years of teaching, he is Professor Emeritus of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Blooming and Contending: Chinese Literature in the Post-Mao Era (1984), The Iron House: A Memoir of the Chinese Democracy Movement and the Tiananmen Massacre (1990) and translator of many works, including Su Tong, Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas (1993), Worlds of Modern Chinese Fiction: Short Stories and Novellas from the People’s Republic, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (editor and co-translator, 1991), and co-translator of Hsu Cho-yun, Rivers in Time: A Cultural History of China. His current project is a two-volume translation of Ge Zhaoguang, An Intellectual History of China: Knowledge, Thought and Belief Through 1895, co-translated with Josephine Chiu-Duke.
Jonathan Dunne was educated at Oxford University and holds advanced diplomas in Spanish, Galician, and Bulgarian. His many translations include: from Spanish, two novels by Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co and Montano’s Malady, nominated for the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; from the Galician, In the Wilderness, nominated for the 2004 Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and The Carpenter’s Pencil, nominated for the 2003 International IMPAC Award, both by Manuel Rivas; from Catalan, In the Last Blue by Carme Riera; and from Bulgarian Iana Boukova’s poems in Take Five 07. He is the author of The DNA of the English Language (2007) and a collection of poetry entitled Even Though That (2004).
Sascha Ebeling was trained in South Asian Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures, and General Linguistics, at the University of Cologne, Germany, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. Before joining the staff of the University of Chicago in 2005, he taught Tamil literature and South Asian Studies at the University of Cologne and also worked for the Göttingen Academy of Sciences as a Tamil manuscriptologist in the project ‘Union Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts in German Collections’.
His book Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India was published by SUNY Press in 2010 and he has published translations from Tamil, Old Javanese, Czech, Catalan and Romansh (Raeto-Romance) into English and German.
He is the recipient of the 2007 Research Award of the German Oriental Society for his work on nineteenth-century Tamil literature, and of the 2008 Whiting Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Core Teaching at the University of Chicago. In July 2010, he was honoured with the award for Outstanding Achievement in Tamil Studies by the Tamil Literary Garden, Toronto.
Robert Elsie is a Canadian with a longstanding (over thirty years) specialism in Albanian and Balkan history and literature. He has translated dozens of novels and stories, interviewed and promoted a wide range of authors and runs an informative, authoritative and vitally important website ‘Albanian Authors in Translation’. The site includes the largest selection of Albanian and Kosovan literature ever to appear in English. He also maintains a website devoted to the history of Albania, comprising a collection of texts from the eleventh century onwards which shed light on a neglected corner of Europe. He also has experience of being an Interpreter for the The Hague International Courts.
Alison Entrekin has translated a number of works by Brazilian and Portuguese authors into English, including City of God by Paulo Lins and Budapest by Chico Buarque, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the United Kingdom. Originally from Australia, she now lives in Brazil.
Over the course of his career, Stephen Epstein has had dual specializations in the ancient Mediterranean and in contemporary Korea. His primary intellectual activities, however, start from a fascination with language and a desire to explore the experience of daily life in other cultures. His research focuses on contemporary Korean society, and he is currently working on a variety of projects addressing popular culture and the media in South Korea. Stephen has also published several translations of Korean and Indonesian fiction, and co-produced two documentaries on the Korean underground music scene. At VUW, he directs the Asian Languages and Cultures Programme and served as director of the Asian Studies Institute between 2003-2008. He also served as the 2013-14 president of the New Zealand Asian Studies Society.
Julian Evans grew up on Australia’s east coast and in the south London suburbs in the 1960s. In 1990 he left his job in London to island-hop across the Pacific Ocean by ship, small plane and boat, a journey that ended five months later at a US nuclear-missile test range at Kwajalein atoll. The book that resulted, Transit of Venus, has been described as “far and away the best book about the Pacific of our times”. His second book is Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis (Jonathan Cape, Picador). He has also written and presented radio and television documentaries and writes for English and French newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and L’Atelier du Roman. He is a recipient of the Prix du Rayonnement de la Langue Française from the Académie Française and lives in London with the artist Natasha Dikaya and their two children.
Ben Faccini is a novelist, writer and translator. He was born in England and brought up in rural France and Italy. He worked for many years at the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in Paris. He is the author of several books, notably The Water-Breather (Flamingo, 2002) and The Incomplete Husband (Portobello, 2007). He has written extensively on issues in the developing world, particularly on the subject of street children and innovations in education.
Evan Fallenberg is a US-born writer, translator and teacher living in Israel. He is the author of the novel Light Fell.
Gerry Feehily was born in London in 1968. Raised in Ireland, he lived in Italy, Spain, Germany and Japan before settling in Paris in the mid nineties.
As well as working for Courrier International, Feehily is also a freelance journalist, specialising in literature and European politics. His articles have appeared in various publications including the Guardian, the Independent, New Statesman, Irish Examiner, Spiked and 3am Magazine. As well as his translation of Into The Quick of Life, Gerry Feehily has also translated Pavel Hak’s novel Sniper, also published by Serpent’s Tail in 2005.
He is the author of two novels, Fever (2007) and Gunk (2013).
Myriam Francois-Cerrah is a journalist, broadcaster and writer with a focus on current affairs, France and the Middle East.
Former assistant editor of emel magazine, she has had articles featured in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the New Statesman, Al Jazeera English, The Independent, The New Internationalist, Your Middle East, the Huffington Post, The London Paper, Index on Censorship, The F-word and others.
Currently a post-graduate researcher (DPhil) at Oxford University, focusing on Islamic movements in Morocco, she tutors in Middle East politics. She has a BA in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University and an MA in Arab Studies, specialising in Middle East politics, from Georgetown University.
Her articles and lectures are featured on her blog: http://myriamfrancoiscerrah.wordpress.com
She tweets @MFrancoisCerrah
Maureen Freely is a novelist and journalist who contributes to the Guardian and the Independent. She translated Orhan Pamuk’s recent novels from Turkish into English. She grew up in Turkey and now lives in England.
Ann Gagliardi, a New England native, lives and works in Bologna, Italy. Her literary translations include work by authors Rosanna Campo, Ascanio Celestini, Margaret Mazzantini and Christian Raimo. Ann holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and a BA in Italian and Medieval Renaissance Studies from Wellesley College.
Iain Galbraith was born on the west coast of Scotland in 1956. A poet, essayist, literary translator and anthologist, he has received various prizes for his work, including the John Dryden Translation Prize, Stephen Spender Prize, and Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize. His recent translations include: Jan Wagner: Self-portrait with a Swarm of Bees. Selected Poems (Arc Publications, 2015), and John Burnside: Anweisungen für eine Himmelsbestattung. Gedichte (Hanser, 2016).
Paul Russell Garrett works from Danish and Norwegian and, on occasion, Swedish. Recent translations include Lars-Henrik Olsen’s Erik and the Gods, Lars Mytting’s The Sixteen Trees of the Somme, and Christina Hesselholdt’s Companions. In 2019, Fitzcarraldo Editions will publish his translation of Hesselholdt’s latest novel, Vivian, a fictional account of the early years of the American street photographer Vivian Maier. Paul serves on the committee of the Translators Association and heads up the [Foreign Affairs] Translates! theatre translation programme.
For his translations of some 30 novels and works of non-fiction, Sam Garrett (b. Harrisburg, PA, 1956) has won prizes and appeared on shortlists for some of the world’s most prestigious literary awards. Garrett is the only translator to have twice won the British Society of Authors’ Vondel Prize for Dutch-English translation (in 2003 and again in 2009).
In 2012, his translation of The Dinner by Herman Koch spent two months on the New York Times bestseller list and became the most popular Dutch novel ever translated into English. Garrett’s translation of Tim Krabbe’s The Rider is considered a cycling cult classic. Other of his works have been shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (2005 and 2013), the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Award (2010), the PEN Translation Prize (2014) and the Best Translated Book Award (2014). He divides his time between Amsterdam and the French Pyrenees.
Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born poet, literary translator, teacher, and author of Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and 2011 May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize. She moved to the US when she was 18, earning an MA in English at Simmons College and an MFA in poetry at Boston University. Her honours include awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, the Banff Centre International Literary Translators Residency, Framingham State University’s Miriam Levine Reader Award, and the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize. Gjika’s own poetry appears in Seneca Review, Salamander, Plume, From the Fishouse and elsewhere. Her translations from the Albanian appear in World Literature Today, Ploughshares, AGNI Online, Catamaran Literary Reader, Two Lines Online, From the Fishouse and elsewhere.
Roland Glasser translates literary and genre fiction from French, as well as art, travel, and assorted nonfiction. He studied theater, cinema, and art history in the UK and France, and has worked extensively in the performing arts, chiefly as a lighting designer.
He is a French Voices and PEN Translates award winner and serves on the Committee of the UK Translators Association.
John Goodby is a critic, poet, translator and arts organiser. An expert on modern Irish poetry, he is also a world authority on Dylan Thomas, editor of the new annotated edition of the Collected Poems (2014) and author of The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (2013). He is the Director of the Dylan Thomas Research Project within CREW, a Fellow of the English Association, and advises the British Council, BBC, AHRC, Literature Wales and other bodies marking the centenary of Dylan Thomas’s birth in 2014.
Projects include: a website and translation app based on Dylan Thomas’s poetry, a collection of essays on Irish poetry, a monograph on Welsh modernist and alternative poetry 1930-2010 and the anthology to go with it, and various poetry collections and translations.
Sam Gordon is a London-based freelance translator working from French and Spanish into English. After completing his undergraduate studies in French and Spanish at the University of Bristol, he went on to take his MA in Translation at the same institution, where he now tutors part-time. He has translated work by writers as varied as Pierre Reverdy, Marcel Schwob, Timothée de Fombelle, Nicolás di Candia and Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, with translations appearing in The White Review, Asymptote and Palabras Errantes.
Other non-literary translation work focuses on the fields of advertising, marketing, tourism and food/wine, though occasionally veers into areas such as secure logistics and industrial trailers. Arab Jazz by Karim Miské (MacLehose Press, 2014) is his first novel-length translation.
Born in rural Herefordshire, Fiona Graham has led an international life with spells in Kenya, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Nicaragua, and Belgium. Reading Modern Languages at Oxford led her naturally to a career in translating and editing at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European Parliament, and the European Commission. She translates from Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish, and German, and is currently the reviews editor at the Swedish Book Review. Fiona loves the great outdoors, especially in Sweden. In her scarce free time, she campaigns on human rights issues and sings with a Latin American choir.
Anna Gunin is a Russian translator and interpreter. Along with poetry, film and theatre translation, she has translated authors such as German Sadulaev, Denis Gutsko and Marianna Geide. She has also translated the war memoirs of the Chechen poet and journalist Mikail Eldin. She lives in Somerset, England, with her husband and son.
Ángel Gurría-Quintana is a translator, journalist and academic. He has reviewed extensively for Financial Times and continues to write for various newspapers and magazines, alongside his work as a literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese. He is also the co-curator of FlipSide Literary Festival, in Suffolk.
Atar Hadari was born in Israel, raised in England, and trained as an actor and writer at the University of East Anglia before winning a scholarship to study poetry and playwrighting with Derek Walcott at Boston University. His plays have won awards from the BBC, Arts Council England, National Foundation of Jewish Culture (New York), European Association of Jewish Culture (Brussels) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was Young Writer in Residence.
His Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik (Syracuse University Press) was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award and his poems have won the Daniel Varoujan award from New England Poetry Club, the Petra Kenney Award, a Paumanok Poetry Award and many other prizes. His nineteen-page translation of Hanoch Levin’s Lives of the Dead filled a third of Poetry magazine in 2009.
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with some forty books to his name. He has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his translation of The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa, and a Blue Peter Book Award for the first in his Ultimate Book Guides series of reading guides for children and teenagers.
A former chair of the Translators Association and national programme director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, he is chair of the Society of Authors and on the board of trustees of a number of organisations working with literature, literacy and free expression, including English PEN, Pop Up and Modern Poetry in Translation.
Hillel Halkin has lived in Israel since 1970, working as a translator, journalist, and author. A leading Hebrew-English and Yiddish-English translator, he has translated more than fifty works of fiction, poetry, and drama, including classic works by Agnon, Sholem Aleichem, Y. L. Peretz, and contemporary Israeli writers such as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua. As a journalist, Halkin was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize when he wrote for the New York weekly Forward, and he has written widely on Israeli and Jewish politics, literature and culture.
Born in Sulaimaniya in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1974, Choman Hardi is is a poet, translator and painter. In 1975 her family fled to Iran after the Algiers Accord but returned to Iraq after a general amnesty in 1979. They were forced to move again in 1988 during the Anfal campaign.Choman arrived in United Kingdom in 1993 as a refugee and studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford and University College London. She did her PhD at the University of Kent, focusing on the effects of forced migration on the lives of Kurdish women from Iraq and Iran.
Choman has published three volumes of poetry in Kurdish. Her first collection of English poems, Life for Us, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004. Choman’s poetry has been widely anthologised, and four of her poems have been studied by GCSE students since 2010. Her poems were recorded for the Poetry Archive in 2010. In 2006 she became one of the youngest poets featured by the ‘Poems on the Underground’ programme.
Nicky Harman
Books
The Book of Sins
Paper Tiger: Inside the Real China
Crystal Wedding
Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China Read
The Chilli Bean Paste Clan
Nicky Harman lives in the UK. She has worked as a literary translator for a dozen years and also organizes translation-focused events and mentors new translators from Chinese. She was Chinese-English workshop leader at the Literary Translation Summer School of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) in 2009, 2010 and 2011) and in 2011 was Translator-in-Residence at London’s Free Word Centre. Her translations include Snow and Shadow,( 雪與影) a collection of short stories by Dorothy Tse (Muse), The Unbearable Dream World of Champa the Driver ( 裸生）by Chan Koonchung (Doubleday) and A New Development Model and China’s Future (新发展方式与中国的未来) (non-fiction) by Deng Yingtao, all released in 2014. She regularly translates for literary journals such as Asymptote and Words without Borders, and was a judge for the Harvill Secker Young Translator Prize in 2012.
Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. She translated Quesadillas and Down the Rabbit Hole by Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos, of which the latter was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. In 2011 she was one of Free Word Centre‘s first ever translators-in-residence.
Winner of the 1997 Kjeld Elfelt Award for translation.
Barbara Haveland (born 1951) is an erstwhile Scottish bookseller who moved to Copenhagen in 1988 with her Norwegian husband and son. In 1999 she and her family moved to Norway where they lived for four years before returning to Denmark. Among the many Danish and Norwegian authors she has translated are Peter Høeg, Claus Jensen, Jan Kjærstad, Linn Ullmann and Henrik Ibsen.
Katherine Hedeen has translated many books by many Spanish-Caribbean writers, including Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Marco Antonio Campos, Luis García Montero, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, José Emilio Pacheco, and Ida Vitale. Among her most recent publications are two books by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez – thaw (Arc Publications, 2013), a recent poetry collection and Every Good Heart Is a Telescope: Early Poems (Toad Press, 2013). She is an associate editor of Earthwork’s Latin American Poetry in Translation Series for Salt Publishing and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Project Grant. She teaches at Kenyon College in the US.
Rosie Hedger was born in Scotland and completed her MA (Hons) in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has lived and worked in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and now lives in York where she works as a freelance translator. Rosie was a candidate in the British Centre for Literary Translation’s mentoring scheme for Norwegian in 2012, mentored by Don Bartlett.
Michael Heim is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches classes in Russian Language, Russian Literature, Czech Language and Comparative Slavonic Literature. He gained his MA and PhD from Harvard University. His translations include: Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Knopf/Penguin); The Joke (Harper & Row/Penguin); The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Harper & Row/Penguin); Jacques and His Master (Harper & Row/Penguin)
Anton Chekhov, Life and Thought (University of California Press), Vassily Aksynov, The Island of Crimea, In Search of Melancholy Baby (Random House).
Olivia Hellewell
Olivia Hellewell is a translator from Slovene to English of literary fiction, children’s fiction, and non-fiction in the field of arts and culture.
Born in London, Aneesa Abbas Higgins studied Sociology, French and Russian at the University of Sussex and later obtained her MA in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of London. She taught French for many years before becoming a freelance literary translator. What Became of the White Savage by François Garde is her first published translation.
Jennifer Higgins is a literary, academic and general translator, working from French and Italian into English. She is also an experienced editor, copy-editor and teacher in all three languages. Based in Oxford, Jennifer runs translation workshops in schools and is a tutor in Advanced Translation at Oxford University.
Former Contributing Editor at Granta Books, Will Hobson is a critic and translator from the French and German, whose translations include Viramma: A Pariah’s Life, Viramma (Verso); The Battle, Patrick Rambaud (Picador); Sans Moi, Marie Desplechin (Granta); Benares, Barlen Pyamootoo (Canongate); and The Dead Man in the Bunker, Martin Pollack (Faber). He writes for the Independent on Sunday, the Observer and Granta magazine, and translated Greenpeace’s presentation to the Pope before the Kyoto Summit into Latin.
John Hodgson was born in England in 1951 and studied English at Cambridge and Newcastle. He has taught at the universities of Prishtina and Tirana. Hodgson has written about Albania, Kosova, the British Balkan traveller Edith Durham, and the novelist John Cowper Powys. He now works as an Albanian-English translator and interpreter, and previously translated Kadare’s Three-Arched Bridge.
Michael Hofmann
Lakshmi Holmström MBE is an Indian-born British writer, literary critic and translator of Tamil fiction and poetry into English. Her translations include Fish in a Dwindling Lake, a translation of short stories by Ambai (Penguin India, 2012); A Second Sunrise: Poems by Cheran, translated and edited by Lakshmi Holmström & Sascha Ebeling (Navayana, 2012); The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry (Penguin India, 2009), of which she is a co-editor; The Hour Past Midnight (Zubaan, 2009), a translation of a novel by Salma; In a Time of Burning, a translation of selected poems by Cheran (Arc, 2013); and, most recently, her translations of poetry by Tamil women, Wild Girls, Wicked Words (2014).
In 2000 she received the Crossword Book Award for her translation of Karukku by Bama (OUP, 2012); in 2007 she shared the Crossword-Hutch Award for her translation of Ambai’s short stories, In a Forest, a Deer (OUP, 2006); in 2008, she received the Iyal Award from the Tamil Literary Garden, Canada; and in the 2011 New Years Honours, she was appointed MBE for services to literature.
She is one of the founding trustees of SALIDAA (South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive), an organisation for archiving the works of British writers and artists of South Asian origin.
Anna Holmwood translates literature from Chinese and Swedish to English. She was awarded one of the first British Centre for Literary Translation mentorship awards in 2010 and has since translated novels, countless short stories for publication and samples for agents and rights sellers. She is currently working on a major series of Chinese martial arts novels by Jin Yong for MacLehose Press. In 2011 she co-founded the Emerging Translators’ Network to support early career translators, and was elected to the UK Translators Association committee in 2012. She lives in China.
Brian Holton studied Chinese at Edinburgh and Durham universities. He has also taught at both establishments, as well as at Newcastle University, where he was the first director of the Translating & Interpreting programme; after that he spent nine years teaching translation in Hong Kong.
He has published many translations of Chinese literature into English and into his native Scots, as well as articles and essays on translation. Beginning in 1994, he has translated several books by the poet Yang Lian.
Havva has lived, studied, and taught in many countries, including Iran, Holland, England, and France. She is a faculty member of the School of International Studies at the University of the Pacific.
Penny Hueston is a Senior Editor at Text Publishing and a translator of numerous stories, articles and poems, including works by Marie Darrieussecq and 2014 Nobel Prize winner, Patrick Modiano. Her latest translation is the compelling novel, Max by Sarah Cohen-Scali.
Sophie Hughes’ translations and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, Asymptote, The White Review, The Times Literary Supplement and Music & Literature. She has worked as an editor-at large for Asymptote and translation correspondent for Dazed & Confused, and in 2015 she co guest edited a Words Without Borders feature on contemporary Mexican literature.
Jonathan Hunt has translated philosophy, literary criticism, art criticism, history of art, modern history, ancient history,medieval history, history of music, archaeology, history of religions. Jonathan translates mainly from Italian, but also from other European languages, including German, Russian and Dutch.
Translations include Niccolò Ammaniti, I’m Not Scared (Canongate 2003); Tommaso Pincio, Love-Shaped Story (Flamingo, 2004); Niccolò Ammaniti, I’ll Steal You Away (Canongate, 2006) and The Crossroads (Canongate, 2009); Nicolai Lilin,Siberian Education (Canongate, 2010); Luca Rastello, I Am the Market (Granta, London, 2010 and Faber & Faber, New York, 2011).
A founding member of Somali PEN Centre, and its vice-president until 2010, Said Jama Hussein is a well known Somali scholar who is actively engaged in the promotion of the Somali language and its literature.
An essayist and short-story writer, his first collection of short stories, entitled Shufbeel was published in book form by Ponte Invisibile, Pisa, Italy in 2010. A second collection of essays and short stories, Safar Aan Jaho Lahayn (A Flight into the Unknown) was published by Ponte Invisibile in 2013.
Many of his stories have appeared in various Somali journals published in London; some have been adapted and broadcast on the Somali section of BBC World Service Radio. Said Jama has also has translated some of Anton Chekhov’s short stories into Somali which were published in book form by Ponte Invisibile in 2011 .
Said Jama is a regular contributor to the two highly popular cultural events, London’s Somali Week Festival and the Hargeysa International Book Fair respectively. He is fluent in English, Arabic and Somali and currently heads the translation section of the Redsea-online Cultural Foundation.
Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from the Arabic. She lived in Cairo from 2007 to 2013, and currently lives in the United States.
Seán Kinsella is from Dublin. He has previously translated works by, amongst others, Kjell Askildsen and Frode Grytten into English. His translation of Stig Sæterbakken’s Through the Night, was long-listed for the BTBA 2014. He lives in Norway.
Steve Komarnyckyj is a British-Ukrainian poet and literary translator who maintains strong ties to Ukraine. His translations and poems have appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, The North, and Modern Poetry in Translation. His selection of translations from Ihor Pavlyuk won an English PEN award in 2013. His first poetry collection, The August Rain (Kalyna Language Press, 2016), has been described by Sean Street as “the articulation of what it means to be human”. He is a co-director of Kalyna Language Press, an independent publisher of translated and original fiction and poetry. His work with KLP has featured in Index on Censorship, The Guardian and The Economist.
Judith Landry
Books
The Last of the Vostyachs
The Mussolini Canal
Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter
Judith Landry was educated at Somerville College, Oxford where she obtained a first class honours degree in French and Italian. Her translated titles include The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga, The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte,The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague by Sylvie Germain and Smarra & Trilby by Charles Nodier. She combines a career as a translator of works of fiction, art and architecture with part-time teaching.
Mara Faye Lethem has translated novels by Jaume Cabré, David Trueba, Albert Sánchez Piñol, Javier Calvo, Patricio Pron, Marc Pastor and Pablo De Santis, among others. Her translations have appeared in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2010, Granta, The Paris Review and McSweeney’s.
Sophie Lewis is a London-born writer, editor and translator from French and Portuguese. Recent translations include The Earth Turned Upside Down by Jules Verne (Hesperus) and The Man Who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Aymé (Pushkin). She is a Senior Editor at the publishing house And Other Stories, and moved to Rio de Janeiro in January 2011.
Tess Lewis is an essayist and translator from French and German. She has translated many books and numerous essays and articles from German and French. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Pascal Bruckner, Julya Rabinowich, Lukas Bärfuss, Philippe Jaccottet, Melinda Nadj Abonji, Jean-Luc Benoziglio and Alois Hotschnig among others. She has also translated for authors of Seagull Book, serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and writes essays on European Literature for various literary journals and newspapers.
Sylvia Li-Chun Lin is Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame. She teaches modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, and culture. Her research interests include Western missionaries and Chinese women, women and new culture in early twentieth-century China, language and identity in Taiwan, and narrative theory. A winner of the Liang Shih-chiu Literary Translation Prize, she also co-translated Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man, winner of the 1999 Translation of the Year award from the American Literary Translators Association.
Janet Lloyd has translated more than seventy books from French by authors such as Jean-Pierre Vernant, Marcel Detienne, and Philippe Descola. She lives in Cambridge.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Books
Like Eating a Stone
Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life
The Assassin from Apricot City
Kolyma Diaries
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a freelance editor and translator. Her translations from Polish include works by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Paweł Huelle, of which the novels Who was David Weiser? and Mercedes-Benz were both short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award.
Michael Lucey is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the translator of Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims as well as the author of a number of books on modern French literature.
Rahima Mahmut is a fluent speaker of English, Mandarin, Uyghur and Turkish. Having had over 15 years of interpreting experience, she has worked with law firms, immigration services, Import Export Companies and International PEN.
Charlotte Mandell was educated at the Universite de Paris III, and Bard College where she majored in French literature and Film Theory. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the poet Robert Kelly. She has translated from the French since 1995, authors including Andre Gide, the Dalai Lama, Jean Genet, Jacque Ranciere, Marcel Proust as well as all of Littell’s previous works. She has worked on titles for publishers such as Melville House, Chatto and Windus, Little Brown and Bloomsbury.
Eliza Marciniak is an editor and translator of Polish literature. In 2014 Eliza was part of the British Centre for Literary Translation’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Scheme, through which she was mentored by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. She has a particular interest in commissioning and book development. Eliza currently lives in London.
Bill Martin (b. Rochester, New York, 1976) published translations (from Polish and German) include Natasza Goerke’s Farewells to Plasma (Twisted Spoon, 2002), selected essays in The Günter Grass Reader (Harcourt, 2004), Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (Overlook Press, 2007).
Charles Edward Gill de Mayol de Lupe was born in London. He was educated at Winchester College, and went on to study French and Spanish at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He moved to Bulgaria in 2000 and makes his living teaching and translating.
Daniella Gill de Mayol de Lupe was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. She finished her secondary education at Lycee Francais ”Romain Rolland” and has a BA in French philology from Sofia University. Following her graduation, she moved to England and did a Film Studies course at Oxford University and a BA in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University. She is currently living in Sofia, where she teaches and translates from/to French and English.
Megan McDowell is a literary translator who lives and works in the United States. Her first book translation was The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra, published in Spring 2010 by Open Letter Press. In 2009 she received a fellowship to attend the annual Banff International Literary Translation Center residency, where she worked on her translation of Juan Emar’s novel Ayer (Yesterday). She graduated in 2009 with a Master’s degree in Literary Translation from the University of Texas in Dallas, where she worked closely with the American Literary Translators Association.
Jamie McKendrick, born in Liverpool, 1955, is a poet and translator. His translations include the anthology The Faber Book of Italian 20th-Century Poems, which he edited; The Embrace: Selected Poems by Valerio Magrelli (Faber, 2009), which was awarded the John Florio Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for translation; the bilingual edition Archipelago by Antonella Anedda (Bloodaxe Books, 2014); a verse play by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Fabrication (Oberon, 2010); two novels by Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles and the short stories The Smell of Hay, published by Penguin Classics. His own books of poetry include The Marble Fly (1997), which won the Forward Prize, Sky Nails: Poems 1979-1997 (2000), Ink Stone (2003), Crocodiles & Obelisks (2007), and most recently Out There (2012), which won the Hawthornden Prize.
Anne McLean
Books
The Armies
The Anatomy of a Moment
The Sound of Things Falling
Feast of the Innocents
The All Saints' Day Lovers
The Sorrows of Mexico
The Shape of the Ruins
Anne McLean has translated works by many Spanish and Latin American authors including Hector Abad, Carmen Martín Gaite, Julio Cortázar, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Enrique Vila-Matas, Tomás Eloy Martínez and Juan Gabriel Vásquez.
Polly McLean is a freelance translator born in South Africa, who grew up in Paris and is now based in Oxford. Previous translations include titles by Catherine Deneuve and Sylvia Kristel (star of the Emmanuelle films) as well as the award-winning Secret by Philippe Grimbert. She is also a founding Director of The Funding Network, established in 2008.
Valerie Miles is an American writer, editor and translator who lives in Barcelona. In 2003, she co-founded Granta en español, which she now oversees under the independent publishing house Galaxia Gutenberg. Her first book, A Thousand Forests in One Acorn was published in English by Open Letter in 2014. She has worked closely with the Bolaño estate in reading through his archive material and preparing work for publication, which grew into the first exhibition of his unpublished papers, Archivo Bolaño, 1977 – 2003. She writes and reviews for publications including the New York Times, The Paris Review and El País. She translates from the Spanish and Catalán and is a professor in the postgraduate program for literary translation at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Robin Moger is an Arabic translator currently living in Cape Town, South Africa. From 2001 to 2007 he lived in Egypt, where he worked variously as a journalist, translator and interpreter. He has translated the novels A Dog With No Tail by Hamdi Abu Gollayel (2009) and Vertigo by Ahmed Mourad (2011), and is a regular contributor to Banipal.
André Naffis-Sahely’s debut collection of poetry, The Promised Land, will be published by Penguin in 2017. He has translated works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Alessandro Spina, Rashid Boudjedra, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Abdellatif Laâbi, among various others.
Rick M. Newton is Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Kent State University, Ohio. He has written extensively on the works of Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Kazantzakis and Ritsos. His many translations include three works by Yiannis Ritsos, Testimonies, 3×111 Tristichs and The Annihilation of Milos. He holds the 2002 Elizabeth Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize from the Modern Greek Studies Association of the United States and Canada.
Lulu Norman is a writer, translator and editor who lives in London. She has translated Albert Cossery, Mahmoud Darwish, Tahar Ben Jelloun and the songs of Serge Gainsbourg. She has also written for national newspapers, the London Review of Books and other literary journals. Her translation of Mahi Binebine’s Welcome to Paradise (Granta, 2003) was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and she has been awarded a 2013 English PEN Award for outstanding writing in translation for this translation of Horses of God.
Brendan O’Kane spent a decade in Beijing, working mostly as a freelance translator and the co-host of the Mandarin-learning podcast Popup Chinese, reviews of which have described him as ‘only slightly annoying.’ He is currently a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania.
Tom Patterdale read Persian at university and worked in Iran for a number of years.
Robin Patterson came late to literary translating, having previously pursued a legal career in various parts of the world. He has participated in both the Birkbeck and the BCLT literary translation summer schools and, in 2013, was mentored by Margaret Jull Costa as part of the BCLT mentorship programme. In 2014, his translated extracts from José Luís Peixoto’s Inside the Secret were serialised by Ninth Letter, and his translation of Eve’s Mango, an extract from Vanessa da Mata’s debut novel, was featured on the Bookanista website. He also contributed a translation of Congressman Romário: Big Fish in the Aquarium by Clara Becker to The Football Crónicas, a collection of football-related Latin American literature published by Ragpicker Press in June 2014. He has translated Our Musseque by José Luandino Vieira for Dedalus.
Frank Perry has translated the work of many of Sweden’s leading writers. His work has won the Swedish Academy prize for the introduction of Swedish literature abroad and the prize of the Writers Guild of Sweden for drama translation.
Fionn Petch was born in Scotland, lived in Mexico City for twelve years, and is now based in Berlin. He translates fiction, poetry and plays from Spanish and French, and also specialises in books and exhibition catalogues on art and architecture. He has curated multidisciplinary exhibitions, including the Citámbulos urban research project, and worked for several film and literature festivals. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from the National University of Mexico (UNAM), on the concept of persuasion in early Greek thought.
Peter Petro
Peter Petro is Professor of Russian and East European literature and Chair of Modern European Studies at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver). He has written Modern Satire: Four Studies (1982), A History of Slovak Literature (1995), and edited Critical Essays on Milan Kundera (1999). He translated Martin Šimečka’s, The Year of the Frog (1993) and Alexej Fulmek’s Dispatches from the Home Front (2000). Born in Bratislava, he was educated there and in Canada.
Mario Petrucci is a metaphysical poet, an ecologist and PhD physicist. He is the only poet to have been resident at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3, and has received major literary prizes across the board (National Poetry Competition (3rd); four times winner of the London Writers competition; Bridport Prize (winner); New London Writers Award). His book-length poem on Chernobyl, Heavy Water (Enitharmon 2004), captured the prestigious Arvon Prize for poetry and forms the backbone of a powerful new film (Seventh Art Productions). His other volumes include Flowers of Sulphur (2007), i tulips (2010) and the waltz in my blood (2011). He devises courses for the Poetry School, the Poetry Society’s Poetryclass initiative and Arvon/Foyle Young Poets. Mario is something of a frontiersman in creative writing projects in the public domain, engaging successfully with the various Imperial War Museum sites and delivering groundbreaking writing packs that tie into science (The Royal Society/ Royal Literary Fund) and ecology (Poetry Society). His remarkable poetry soundscape Tales from the Bridge was a centrepiece of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry. Mario lives in north London.
Clare Pollard was born in Bolton in 1978 and studied at Cambridge University. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2000 and was named by The Independent as one of their ‘Top 20 Writers Under 30’.
Her first poetry collection, The Heavy-Petting Zoo, was published in 1998 and her second and third collections, Bedtime and Look, Clare! Look!, were published in 2002 and 2005 respectively. She has also presented two television documentaries, one for Channel 4 with verse commentary. Her first play, The Weather (2004), was staged at the Royal Court in Autumn 2004, and her documentary for radio, My Male Muse (2007), was a BBC Radio 4 Pick of the Year. Clare has been Managing Editor of The Idler and editor of the poetry journal Reactions. Her journalism has been published in The Guardian, The Independent, The TES, Magma and The London Magazine.
Clare Pollard lives in London and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Essex Universty. In 2009 she edited an anthology of new poetry with James Byrne, Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (2009). Her latest collection of poetry is the Poetry Book Society recommended Changeling (2011).
As a writer, Clare is very concerned with bearing witness to the times in which we live. Her work has frequently engaged with contemporary concerns, from our confessional media culture in Bedtime, to climate change in The Weather and globalisation in Look, Clare! Look!.
Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer-turned-translator. She grew up in Bangkok and Boston, and practiced law in New York City before returning to the literary field. She recently graduated with an M.A. in cultural translation at the American University of Paris and previously studied literature as an undergraduate at Harvard College. The Sad Part Was is her first translation.
Perween Richards is a literary translator from Arabic. She attended the Translate at City summer school in London in 2016, and was one of two winners of the school’s annual translation competition, sponsored by Comma Press.
Maurice Riordan is an Irish poet, translator, and editor born in 1953 in Lisgoold, Co. Cork. His first collection, A Word from the Loki (1995) was nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Floods (2000) was a Book of the Year in both the Sunday Times and Irish Times. The Holy Land (2007) won the Michael Hartnett Award. He has taught at Imperial College and Goldsmiths College, and is currently Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University. In 2013 Riordan was appointed Editor of Poetry Review.
Elisabeth Roberts was born in Cardiff and educated at Oxford University. She has been a freelance translator and editor for many years. She is married to Wiliam Own Roberts and has translated three of his novels into English: Pestilence, Petrograd and Paris.
Lola Rogers is a Finnish to English literary translator living in Seattle. She holds degrees in Linguistics and Finnish Language and Literature from the University of Washington and trained and interned in translation at FILI Finnish Literature Exchange in Helsinki.
Lola has contributed translations of fiction, non-fiction and poetry to a variety of journals and anthologies and has translated numerous novels, including True by Riikka Pulkkinen, which was a Shelf Unbound best book of 2012, and Purge by Sofi Oksanen, chosen as a best book of 2010 by The California Literary Review, The Sunday Times and others. Other translations include works by Pasi Jääskeläinen, Johanna Sinisalo and Rosa Liksom.
Lola is a founding member of the Finnish–English Literary Translation Cooperative.
Samuel Rutter is a writer, translator and academic from Melbourne, Australia. His writing has appeared in journals including Meanjin, Overland and Island, and he has translated authors including César Aira and Daniel Sada. He is a final year PhD student at the University of Melbourne and recently returned from time as a visiting researcher at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Winterlings is his first book-length translation.
Brazilian by birth, Julia Sanches has lived in the United States, Mexico, Switzerland, Scotland and Catalonia. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Philosophy and English Literature from the University of Edinburgh and has a masters in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Her translations have appeared in Suelta, The Washington Review, Asymptote, Two Lines and Revista Machado, amongst others.
Martin Schifino was born in Buenos Aires. He has a degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Buenos Aires and Medieval English Literature from King’s College London. He has regularly contributed to the Times Literary Supplement and various different Spanish and Latin American publications. Schifino has translated four books previously from the Spanish: This Breathing World, by José Luis de Juan (Arcadia, London, 2007), Blood of The Angels, by Eugenio Fuentes (Arcadia, 2007), Water-Blue Eyes, by Domingo Villar (Arcadia, 2008), and The Pianist’s Hands, also by Eugenio Fuentes (Arcadia 2008).
Lawrence Schimel is an American writer who has lived in Madrid since 1999. Schimel writes in both Spanish and English and has published over 100 titles as author or anthologist, which includes many children’s books. His writing has been translated into over thirty languages, including Icelandic, Maltese, Estonian, and Turkish. In addition to his own writing, he works as a Spanish-English literary translator.
With over 60 titles to her name, Ros Schwartz has translated a wide range of Francophone fiction and non-fiction authors including Dominique Manotti (whose Lorraine Connection (Arcadia) won the 2008 International Dagger Award), and Lebanese writer Dominique Eddé, whose Kite (Seagull Books), was longlisted for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in the USA. In 2010 she published a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (shortlisted for the Marsh children’s book award) and she is involved in translating a number of Maigret titles for Penguin Classics’ new Simenon edition.
Ros frequently publishes articles and gives workshops and talks on literary translation around the world. She is co-organiser of a 2014 translation summer school in association with City University, London. In 2009 she was made Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her services to literature.
Erica Segre is a native Italian speaker and fellow in Spanish at Trinity College, Cambridge. With Simon Carnell she has co-translatied poems by Montale, Ungaretti and Quasimodo, which were included in the recent Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry.
Haroon Shirwani was one of the translators of Beirut39. He is Head of Arabic at Eton College, having studied Arabic, French and History at Oxford and London universities. Previously, he tutored in Oriental Studies at Oxford and worked as a lecturer in translation at Buckingham University. Each year he produces A Taste of Texts – a selection from Arabic literature, with his translations, for use by students and teachers.
Professor Miriam Shlesinger was a practising translator and interpreter, a teacher of translation and one of the leading international scholars of interpreting. She received her BA in Musicology and English Linguistics from the Hebrew University, her MA in Poetics and Literary Studies from Tel Aviv University, and her PhD from the English Department at Bar-Ilan University. Prof. Shlesinger passed away on November 10, 2012.
Sondra Silverston has lived in Israel since 1970. Her translations include fiction by contemporary Israeli authors Amos Oz, Eshkol Nevo, Savyon Liebrecht and Aharon Megged as well the fiction and essays of Etgar Keret.
Deborah Smith (@londonkoreanist)’s literary translations from the Korean include two novels by Han Kang, The Vegetarian and Human Acts (both Portobello UK, Crown US), and two by Bae Suah, The Essayist’s Desk (Open Letter 2016) and The Low Hills of Seoul (Deep Vellum 2016).
Deborah recently founded @TiltedAxisPress, a not-for-profit press focusing on contemporary literary fiction. Tilted Axis’ first titles will include a darkly erotic Bengali novella, an obliquely allegorical take on South Korea’s social minorities, and a feminist, environmentalist narrative poem from Indonesia, published as a ‘sight-impaired-accessible’ art book. These will be followed by translations from Thai, Uzbek, and Japanese.
Jethro Soutar is a translator of Spanish and Portuguese. He has translated crime fiction from Argentina (Needle in a Haystack by Ernesto Mallo, nominated for an International Dagger) and Brazil (Hotel Brasil by Frei Betto, winner of a PEN award) for Bitter Lemon Press. His translation of By Night The Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel was published by And Other Stories in November 2014. He also co-edited and co-translated The Football Crónicas for Ragpicker Press.
Helen Stevenson is a piano teacher, writer and translator, and lives in Somerset. She has translated works by Marie Darrieussecq, Alice Ferney and Catherine Millet, as well as several books by Alain Mabanckou.
Geoffrey Strachan is the renowned translator of Andreï Makine. His translation of Makine’s Le Testament Français was awarded the Scott-Moncrieff Prize.
Oonagh Stransky was born in Paris and now resides in New York City. She grew up in the Middle East and in London, and attended Mills College and UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, Universita’ di Firenze, and Columbia University. She teaches English in a performing arts high school in New York.
Stransky has been a board member of the American Literary Translators Association since 2003. Her translations of Born Twice and Day After Day were both nominated for the Dublin Impac Award and Almost Blue won the Booksense 76 Award in 2000.
Arch Tait studied Russian, German and Swedish at at Cambridge University and wrote his PhD thesis for Cambridge on the plays of Lenin’s Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky. He has taught Russian language and literature at the Universities of East Anglia, Norwich and Birmingham for many years, and is the UK editor of the translation series Glas New Russian Writing (see www.russianwriting.com). He has translated novels by Peter Aleshkovsky, Vladimir Makanin, Ludmila Ulitskaya and Andrey Volos, and short stories by many other Russian authors, including Victor Pelevin and Anatoly Kurchatkin.
Kamran Talattof previously co-translated Parsipur’s Women Without Men and is associate professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, Tuscan.
Sam Taylor is the translator of HHhH, by Laurent Binet, and the author of the novels The Island at the End of the World, The Amnesiac and The Republic of Trees. He lives in France and the United States.
Ko Ko Thett
Books
To Leave with the Reindeer
The Book of Cairo
The Madwoman of Serrano
Sergius Seeks Bacchus
Zuleikha
The Remainder
Bones Will Crow
ko ko thett grew up in Burma. By the early 1990s, he was thoroughly poeticized and politicized at Rangoon Institute of Technology. In 1996 he published and clandestinely distributed two uncensored chapbooks on the campus. He left the country in 1997 following a brief detention for his role in the December 1996 student uprising in Rangoon. ko ko thett has written extensively for several Burma journals and leading papers in Finland.
Ngũgi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 in Kenya. He was educated at Makerere University College in Uganda. In 1964 he wrote his first novel Weep Not, Child.
In 1977 his play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) led to his arrest and imprisonment under Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenyan government. He spent a year in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison without charge. While behind bars he wrote the novel Devil on the Cross, and later captured his time in prison in Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary.
Ngũgi was released in 1978, but he and his family were continuously harassed by the Kenyan regime. Ngũgi left Kenya and went into exile in 1982. He continued to write and in 1986 his novel Matigari was banned in Kenya. In 1992 he became Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University and in 2004 he returned to Kenya for two years, until an armed robbery at his home once again forced him into exile for fear of his family’s safety.
Ngũgi is now Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.
James Thomas is a professional translator from Occitan and Catalan and a researcher in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Occitan literature. He is the translator of Solstice and Other Poems: Poems in Occitan by Aurélia Lassaque (2012) and has published articles on Occitan-related subjects and translation theory.
Stefan Tobler translates from German and Portuguese. His translations of poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines and he has also translated three travel books for Haus Publishing’s Armchair Traveller series. He became a full-time freelance translator in early 2005 and in the same year received a scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to do a MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia. He is the founder of And Other Stories publishing.
Marek Tomin was born in Prague and grew up in England, where his family found refuge after being exiled in 1980 by the Communist regime. A graduate of Oxford University, he lives in Prague again where he works as a freelance translator, journalist, documentary producer, and contemporary art curator. His translations include Of Kids & Parents by Emil Hakl, Pavel Z.’s Time Is a Mid-Night Scream, and Ladislav Klíma’s Glorious Nemesis. He also translated Jáchym Topol’s Nightwork (Portobello Books, 2014).
Stephen Twilley is managing editor of the online review Public Books and the translator of several books from Italian, including Francesco Pacifico’s The Story of My Purity and Fabio Stassi’s Charlie Chaplin’s Last Dance.
Daniela Ugaz
Books
The Story of Vicente, Who Murdered His Mother, His Father, and His Sister: Life and Death in Juárez
Daniela Ugaz is a writer and paralegal based in Arizona, USA.
Alex Valenta is a European half-Yorkshire, half-Tuscan freelance translator. He has researched comics, poetry, and their translation, edits the Arts section of the Norwich Radical, regularly translates for Booksinitaly.com, and does voluntary work for non-profit organisations.
Thoraya El-Rayyes’ translations have appeared in literary journals/magazines, including World Literature Today and Banipal. In 2014 she received the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award for her translation of Hisham Bustani. Mohammed Ghalaieni was raised bilingually and schooled in Gaza from the age of ten, working on translation projects in New York and Gaza. Sarah Irving is the author and editor of several books, and teaches Arabic at the University of Edinburgh. Elisabeth Jaquette is a graduate student at Columbia University, regularly translates for journals/magazines, and has worked with the PEN World Voices Festival. Andrew Leber is based in Doha, and has translated excerpts of Syrian and Palestinian Literature, including Hani al-Rahib and Atef Abu Saif. Adam Talib teaches classical Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo, and is the translator of Fadi Azzam, Khairy Shalaby and Mekkawi Said, to name a few.
Marian de Vooght is the editor (with Jean Boase-Beier) of The Holocaust Poetry Anthology. She has translated many writers from Dutch and Flemish, including Maurice Gillians, Geert van Istendael and Eric Spinoy. She has taught at the universities of Texas, Trondheim, Konstanz and East Anglia, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the University of Essex.
Helen has a BA Hons in Chinese from SOAS, University of London. She has written and edited multiple books and articles, and is in 2015 the Curator of East Asian Money at the British Museum. Her translations for children include Jackal and Wolf by Shen Shixi (Egmont, 2012), Pai Hua Zi and the Clever Girl by Zhang Xinxin (a graphic novel for children set in 1960s Beijing published as an e-book in 2012), short fantasy story Dragonworld by Zhang Xinxin (The Guardian, 2012), Galloping Horses by Xu Zechen (The Guardian, 2012).
John Washington
Books
The Story of Vicente, Who Murdered His Mother, His Father, and His Sister: Life and Death in Juárez
John Washington is a journalist and novelist currently based in Arizona, USA
Alyson Waters is a translator of modern and contemporary French literature. In 2012, she won the French-American Foundation Translation Award for her translation of Eric Chevillard’s Prehistoric Times. Waters has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translates grant, and several residency grants. She teaches literary translation at New York University and Columbia University.
Max Weiss
Books
A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution
The Silence and the Roar
States of Passion
Max Weiss is an American scholar and translator, specialising in the culture and history of the Middle East. He studied biology and history at University of California, Berkeley before moving on to Stanford University, where he completed his PhD in modern Middle Eastern history in 2007. Weiss is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi’ism and the Making of Modern Lebanon (2010). He is also a noted translator of contemporary Arabic literature into English. His translation of Abbas Beydoun’s novel Blood Test won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in 2010.
Adrian Nathan West is a writer and translator of numerous award-winning authors including Austrian novelist Josef Winkler and Catalan poet Pere Gimferrer. He lives between Spain and the United States with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.
Shaun Whiteside has translated over 50 books from German, French, Italian and Dutch, including novels by Amélie Nothomb, Luther Blissett, Wu Ming and Marcel Möring. His translations of Freud, Musil, Schnitzler and Nietzsche are published by Penguin Classics, and his translation of Magdalena the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger won the 1996 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize. His most recent translation from German is The Giraffe’s Neck by Judith Schalansky, and he is currently working on the translation of two novels by Georges Simenon.
A former chair of the Translators Association, he sits on the editorial board of New Books in German and the Advisory Panel of the British Centre for Literary Translation, where he regularly teaches at the summer school. He lives in London with his wife and son.
Tim Wilkinson (born 1947) grew up in Sheffield but has lived much of his adult life in London and has spent some time in Budapest. He is the principal English translator of Imre Kertész (including Fatelessness, Fiasco, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Liquidation and Dossier K) and Miklós Szentkuthy (Marginalia on Casanova, Towards the One and Only Metaphor), among others, as well as shorter works by a wide range of other contemporary Hungarian-language authors.
Natasha Wimmer is an American translator best known for her translations of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and The Savage Detectives from Spanish into English. Wimmer learned Spanish in Spain, where she spent four years growing up.
She has also translated Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Language of Passion, The Way to Paradise, and Letters to a Young Novelist, as well as Dirty Havana Trilogy by the Cuban novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.
She received the PEN American Center Translation Prize in 2009.
Willard Wood is the winner of the 2002 Lewis Galantière Award for Literary Translation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation. He lives in Connecticut.
Jonathan Wright studied Arabic at Oxford University in the 1970s and has spent 18 of the past 30 years in the Arab world, mostly as a journalist with the international news agency, Reuters. His first major literary translation was of Khaled el-Khamissi’s best-selling book Taxi, published in English by Aflame Books in 2008.
Frank Wynne
Books
Allah is Not Obliged
Purgatory
Harraga
The Impostor
The Patagonian Hare
Seven Ways to Kill a Cat
Born in Sligo, Ireland, in 1962, Frank Wynne has worked in journalism and as a magazine publisher. His translations have been published by Weidenfeld, Fourth Estate, Penguin and Heinemann.
Maxamed Xasan ‘Alto’ was born in 1960. He studied in Somalia and Soviet Union and has an MA in Journalism. Since 2004 he has been a teacher in Somali language at SOAS London. He is a writer and freelance journalist and has published and edited many books in Somali language. He has worked closely with Dr Martin Orwin on a number of Somali poetry translation and is closely involved with the Poetry Translation Centre.
Alex Zucker’s 2013 translation of Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop received an English PEN Award for Writing in Translation, the Typographical Translation Award, and was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. His translation of All This Belongs to Me, by Petra Hůlová, won the ALTA National Translation Award. His projects include Heda Margolius Kovály’s Innocence, or, Murder on Steep Street for Soho Press, and Tomáš Zmeškal’s Love Letter in Cuneiform for Yale University Press. Zucker works out of his third-floor apartment in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, NY.