Translators Association

TA Committee 2009/10

Daniel Hahn (Chair) is a freelance writer, editor, researcher and translator. He is the author of The Tower Menagerie (Simon & Schuster), the official history of the Roundhouse, and co-author of the guidebook to Shakespeare’s Globe. Among some 30 translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French), major projects include Creole (2002) and The Book of Chameleons (2006) by Angolan novelist José Eduardo Agualusa. The latter won him the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Alexandra Büchler is Director of Literature Across Frontiers, a European programme of international literary exchange, a member of the editorial board of the European Internet Review of Books and Writing, Transcript, and editor of a new international series of contemporary poetry anthologies by Arc Publications. A translator of fiction, poetry, theatre plays and texts on modern art and architecture from English, Czech and Greek, she has translated over twenty-five works, including books by authors such as J. M. Coetzee, David Malouf, Jean Rhys, Janice Galloway and Rhea Galanaki into Czech. She has also edited and part-translated a number of anthologies, including This Side of Reality: Modern Czech Writing (1996) and A Fine Line: New Poetry from Central and Eastern Europe, Arc Publications(2004).

Nick Caistor translates from the French, Portuguese and Spanish, and his translations include José Saramago’s Journey to Portugal, Paulo Coelho’s The Devil and Miss Prym, and The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vázquez Montalban. He won the 2007 Premio Valle Inclán (for translation from the Spanish) for Dulce Chacón’s The Sleeping Voice and in 2008 shared the prize for Alan Paul's The Past. He is also editor and translator of the Faber Book of Contemporary Latin American Stories. Nick is a former BBC Latin American analyst and currently teaches translation at the University of East Anglia.

Sarah Death has worked as a translator and reviewer for some 20 years. She has translated works by Swedish writers as diverse as Fredrika Bremer, Kerstin Ekman, Sven Lindqvist and Carl-Johan Vallgren, and has twice won the Bernard Shaw Prize for translation from Swedish. Sarah edits the Swedish Book Review and also serves the committee of SELTA (Swedish-English Literary Translators Association).

Maureen Freely is a non-fiction author, journalist, and translator. She has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Independent, and The Sunday Times for two decades, and is also deputy director of the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick. Maureen is perhaps best known for her translations of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (2003), Istanbul: Memories of a City (2004) and The Black Book (2005) and for her campaigning journalism after Pamuk and 80 other writers were prosecuted for insulting Turkishness, state institutions, and the memory of Ataturk.

Kevin Halliwell taught for 12 years at university level in France and Italy before relocating to Brussels for a 14 year stint as an EU linguist, working mainly from French, Italian and Swedish, with the odd bit of German, Dutch and Czech thrown in for good measure. Currently based in London, he has a special interest in translating for the theatre. He has translated works by contemporary Swedish dramatists Cecilia Parkert, Björn Runge, Klas Abrahamsson and Marianne Goldman. He won the Gate Theatre Translation Award in 2002. He is also a SELTA committee member.

Polly McLean’s first translation (from the French) was Guillaume Lecasble’s Lobster, the sexy but tragic tale of a woman's seduction by a crustacean. Followed by the memoirs of Catherine Deneuve and Sylvia Kristel, this instigated a particular interest in the feminine and the erotic. Publishers include Harvill Secker, Harpercollins, Serpent's Tail and Portobello. Polly won the 2009 Scott Moncrieff Prize for her translation of Gross Margin, by Laurent Quintreau.

Ros Schwartz dropped out of university and ran away to Paris in the early ’70s. Since 1981 she has translated some 50 works of fiction and non-fiction from French. She is the co-translator of Dominique Manotti’s Lorraine Connection, which won the 2008 International Dagger Award, and of Manotti’s previous novel, Dead Horsemeat, which was shortlisted in 2006. She is Chair of the European Council of Literary Translators Associations and gives frequent workshops and talks on the art of translation.

Sandra Smith is the translator of works by Irène Némirovsky: Suite Française, David Golder, Fire in the Blood, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, All Our Worldly Goods and The Courilof Affair. Her translation of Suite Française won the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize for fiction, as well as the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 2007 and the Independent British Booksellers Book of the Year Prize in 2007. It was voted Book of the Year by the Times and was short-listed for the Oxford Wiedenfeld Translation Prize. She is a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, where she teaches French Language and Literature.

Paul Vincent taught Dutch at London University for many years, and since 1989 has been a freelance translator from Dutch and German. In fiction he has translated numerous modern classics from the Low Countries, including work by Couperus, Elsschot, Mulisch, Boon and Van den Brink. In addition he specialises in non-fiction and poetry, translating a wide range of poetry from the seventeenth century on. In 2007 he co-edited an anthology of twentieth-century stories, In Praise of Navigation (Seren Books). He is a member of the Society of Dutch Literature.

Valerie Henitiuk: ex-officio, BCLT representative

Shaun Whiteside: ex-officio, CEATL representative

Secretary: Sarah Burton

See also

Academic Writers Group
Broadcasting Group
Childrens Writers and Illustrators Group
Educational Writers Group
Medical Writers Group
Regional Groups
Subsidiary Groups
The Society of Authors in Scotland