Juliet Winters Carpenter was born in Michigan in 1948. She has twice received the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission for the Translation of Japanese Literature, in 1980 for Abe Kōbō’s Secret Rendezvous and in 2014 for Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel. In addition to a wide range of works on Japanese culture and religion, she has translated fiction by authors such as Enchi Fumiko, Tawara Machi, Watanabe Shin’ichi, Miyabe Miyuki, Shiba Ryōtarō, Miura Shion, and Hirano Keiichirō. With Aotani Yuko, she edited the bilingual book Gems of Japanese Literature. A professor emerita of Doshisha Women’s College, she lives on Whidbey Island in Washington State. Image (c) Tetsuji Yamamoto
Howard Curtis has translated more than a hundred books, mostly fiction, from Italian, French and Spanish. Among the Italian writers he has translated are Luigi Pirandello, Beppe Fenoglio, Leonardo Sciascia, Giorgio Scerbanenco, Gianrico Carofiglio, Pietro Grossi, Filippo Bologna, Fabio Geda, Andrej Longo, Paolo Sorrentino, Matteo Righetto and Marco Malvaldi.
Kari Dickson is a literary translator from Norwegian. Her work includes crime fiction, literary fiction, children’s books, theatre and non-fiction. She is also an occasional tutor in Norwegian language, literature and translation at the University of Edinburgh, and has worked with BCLT and the National Centre for Writing. She is current co-chair for the Translators’ Association.
Image (c) Andy Catlin
Anton Hur is a Korean translator. His book translations include Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny (Honford Star), Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City (Tilted Axis, Grove) and Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets (Feminist Press, Weidenfeld & Nicolson). He has won translation grants from English PEN, PEN America, the Literary Translation Institute of Korea, the Korea Publication Industry Promotion Agency, the Daesan Foundation, and other organizations. A graduate of the Korea University College of Law and Seoul National University Graduate School, he resides in Seoul.
Sawad Hussain is an Arabic translator and litterateur who is passionate about bringing narratives from the African continent to wider audiences. She was co-editor of the Arabic-English portion of the award-winning Oxford Arabic Dictionary (2014). Her translations have been recognised by English PEN, the Anglo-Omani Society and the Palestine Book Awards, among others. She has run workshops introducing translation to students and adults under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes and Shubbak Festival. She has forthcoming translations from Fitzcarraldo Editions, MacLehose Press, and Tilted Axis Press. She holds an MA in Modern Arabic Literature from SOAS. Her Twitter handle is @sawadhussain.
Meena Kandasamy (b. 1984) is an anti-caste activist, poet, novelist and translator. As a translator, she has translated the speeches and essays of Dravidian ideologue Periyar EV Ramasamy and Dalit leader Thol. Thirumavalavan on caste annihilation, women’s liberation and social justice. She has also translated the poetry of Tamil guerrillas and contemporary feminists. Her translation of Tamil novelist Salma’s Manamiyangal (Women Dreaming, Tilted Axis, 2020) won a PEN Translates Award. Her feminist translation of the Inbathupaal (The Book of Desire) from the Thirukkural is forthcoming. Follow her on Twitter @meenakandasamy
Image (c) Varun Vasudevan
Antonia Lloyd-Jones translates from Polish, and last year her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the Man Booker International award. She translates classic and contemporary fiction, reportage, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. She is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association. This will be her ninth mentorship for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme.
Canan Marasligil (she/her) is a feminist writer, literary translator, artist, editor and curator of cultural programmes, whose practice span from performing to making podcasts. She works in English, French, Turkish and Dutch, occasionally in Spanish, and she is active in the fields of literature, comics, cultural criticism and art. As an intersectional feminist who strives to challenge dominant narratives, she advocates for representation, equality and diversity. She has developed and launched the Creative Translators Workshop for the Read My World International Literature Festival, aiming to create a pool of diverse translators and multilingual storytellers to work with the festival.
Find out more at cananmarasligil.net Twitter: @ayserin Instagram: @cananmarasligil
Image (c) Anita Staff
Oliver Ready is a Research Fellow of St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, where he has taught Russian literature and translation for a number of years. His translations include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Penguin), stories by Nikolai Gogol under the title And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon (Pushkin Press) and, from more recent Russian fiction, books by Yuri Buida and Vladimir Sharov for Dedalus, three of which have received translation prizes (the Rossica prize and two Read Russia awards). He is the author of Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963-2013 (Peter Lang). Website#
Image (c) Ania Ready
Ros Schwartz has translated some 100 works of fiction and non-fiction. Her most recent translation is Swiss-Cameroonian author Max Lobe’s A Long Way from Douala, published by Hope Road, and she is part of the team re-translating the works of Georges Simenon for Penguin Classics.
Ros frequently leads translation workshops and is a regular speaker on translation issues. She co-organises an annual translation summer school – this year online under the banner of the University of Bristol. She has mentored emerging translators from Cameroon in association with the University of Bristol and Bakwa Books in Yaoundé.
Ros was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009. Twitter @RosSchwartz
Jamie Lee Searle translates from German and Portuguese into English, and is a co-founder of the Emerging Translators Network. She is currently working on the quirky thriller Kalmann by Joachim B. Schmidt for Bitter Lemon Press, and her recent publications include Twelve Nights by Urs Faes (Harvill Secker). Jamie previously taught at Queen Mary, University of London, where she did an MA in Anglo-German Cultural Relations. She is the recipient of a PEN/Heim grant and has held residencies at Writers Omi, New York, and the Austrian Society for Literature, Vienna. Twitter @JamieLeeSearle
Kaija Straumanis is an award-winning translator from the Latvian. She has an MA in Literary Translation Studies from the University of Rochester in New York, and is the Editorial Director of Open Letter Books. Her translations include works by such authors as Inga Ābele, Jānis Joņevs, Laura Vinogradova, Gundega Repše, among others. She received a 2020 NEA Literature Translation Fellowship for her work on Forest Daughters ed. Sanita Reinsone.
