Now in its 11th year, we are delighted to showcase our 2022 cohort of Emerging Literary Translators.
A PDF version of the anthology can be downloaded here →
Purchase a free hard copy of the anthology (p&p applies) here →
Astrid Freuler – Swiss German (mentored by Jamie Lee Searle)Astrid Freuler grew up near Zurich and moved to the UK in 1996 to study Fine Art. She subsequently turned to translation and took the Chartered Institute of Linguists Diploma in 2003. She has since worked as a freelance commercial translator from German, specializing in marketing and the environment. More recently, she has also branched out into literary translation as well as working on historic documents composed in old German script. Based in the Forest of Dean, she regularly returns to Switzerland to visit family, friends and the mountains.
Amaryllis Gacioppo – Italian (mentored by Howard Curtis)Amaryllis Gacioppo is a bilingual Australian writer and translator who lives in Trieste, Italy. She has a PhD in Literary Studies and Creative Writing from Monash University and the University of Bologna. Her first book, Motherlands, is a work of creative nonfiction about cities, ancestral homelands and citizenship and will be published by Bloomsbury in 2022. She is over the moon about receiving an NCW mentorship and excited about the opportunity to work on her literary translation skills with Howard Curtis.
Salma Harland – Arabic (mentored by Sawad Hussain)Salma Harland is an Egyptian-born, UK-based literary translator who works between Arabic (Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and Egyptian Arabic) and English. She holds an MA in Literature and Philosophy from the University of Sussex, a PGCert in Translation and Interpreting from the American University in Cairo, and a BA in Translation from October 6 University. Salma translates literature, philosophy, and everything in between, but she has a particular passion for pre-Nahda and (post)modern Arabic poetry. Her literary translations (both into English and Arabic) have appeared or are forthcoming in Ancient Exchanges, ArabLit Quarterly, Eurolitkrant, Jadaliyya, Romman Magazine, Turjoman, among others. Website
Jess Jensen Mitchell – Polish (mentored by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)Jess Jensen Mitchell is a translator of Polish literature. Her work has appeared in H-Soz-Kult and Meduza. Jess holds a Joint Honours degree from McGill University, where she edited the multilingual literary journal, Samizdat. Before beginning her PhD in Slavic Literatures at Harvard University, Jess lived in both Kraków and Warsaw (and she will not reveal which city she prefers). She recently participated in the Bread Loaf Translation Workshop led by Edward Gauvin.
Ieva Lakute – Latvian (mentored by Kaija Straumanis)Since graduating from Bath Spa University with an MA in Creative Writing, Ieva has worked freelance as a writer and Latvian-English literary translator. Her portfolio of translations includes poems, novel extracts and plays. She was longlisted for the 2020 John Dryden Translation Competition for her translation of The Twenty-Fifth Hour (Tetovētāja Piektā Stunda) by Alvils Bergs. Her love for theatre and cross-cultural collaboration led her to complete the 2020 Theatre Translators Mentorship with Foreign Affairs. She is particularly interested in building and deepening connections between Latvian and British theatres through her role as a translator.
Lise Lærdal Bryn – Norwegian (mentored by Kari Dickson)Lise Lærdal Bryn is a translator, writer and actor from Stavanger, Norway who translates prose and drama from Norwegian. She has a BA in ‘Cross-Cultural Storytelling: a bilingual study of visual, literary and dramatic narrative’ from the University of Redlands in California, and she just completed an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. She is currently based in London to be near theatres and to be immersed in the English language and culture, and she spends her summers in Norway, gardening at her family’s business.
Hanna Leliv – Ukranian (mentored by Canan Marasligil)Hanna Leliv is a freelance literary translator based in Lviv, Ukraine. In 2017–2018, she was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Iowa’s Literary Translation Workshop. Among her translations into Ukrainian are texts by Kazuo Ishiguro, Ernest Hemingway, and Stephen Hawking. Her translations of contemporary Ukrainian literature into English have appeared in Asymptote, Washington Square Review, The Adirondack Review, The Puritan, and Apofenie. Hanna also spent six years volunteering for TED Translators and serving as a Ukrainian language coordinator. She teaches the literary translation workshop at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.
Irina Sadovina – Russian (mentored by Oliver Ready)Irina Sadovina is a translator from Yoshkar-Ola, Russia. She was shortlisted for the Academia Rossica Young Translators Award back in 2011, and she is now looking forward to getting back to translation in order to highlight works that reflect Russia’s incredible cultural diversity. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and a PhD in Literature and Cultural Research (Folklore) from the University of Tartu. She is working as a University Teacher of Russian at the Modern Languages Teaching Centre at the University of Sheffield.
Shanna Tan – Korean (mentored by Anton Hur)Shanna Tan is a Singaporean translator based in Singapore. She translates from Korean, Chinese and Japanese. She majored in Linguistics & Multilingual Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her passions are the 3 Ls — languages, linguistics and literature. She is grateful to the National Centre for Writing (NCW) for the wonderful opportunity to work with Anton Hur during this mentorship programme.
Yuki Tejima –Japanese (mentored by Juliet Winters Carpenter)Yuki Tejima is a translator working from Japanese to English, currently based in Tokyo and Los Angeles. Born in Tokyo, she moved to Los Angeles at age 4, where she grew up immersed in two languages and cultures. Living in Kyoto for one year as an exchange student during university, a passion was ignited for her home country and its literature. She has worked in film, television and commercial translation for many years, and received the JLPP International Translation Competition Award in 2021 for her literary translations into English.
Csilla Toldy – Hungarian (mentored by Meena Kandasamy)Early in her career, Csilla Toldy translated fiction and non-fiction from German and English for Hungarian publishers. After moving to the UK with an artist visa in 1996, she focussed on her own writing and attended the University of Sheffield, where she was granted a Masters Degree in creative writing. She is an exophonic writer with three books of poetry published by Lapwing Belfast and a short story collection (Stupor Mundi, 2019). Her first novel is forthcoming with Wrecking Ball Press in 2022. Csilla is passionate about bringing Hungarian contemporary fiction to English readers.
