Translators Association

TA Committee 2009

Shaun Whiteside (Chair) has twenty years’ experience as a translator from several different languages – French, German, Italian, Dutch – covering a wide range of genres, from the classics (Freud, Nietzsche) to contemporary fiction (Luther Blissett, Amélie Nothomb), and for many different publishers both here and in the US. Originally from Northern Ireland and now London-based, he has also worked in the past as a producer of television documentaries.

Don Bartlett was a teacher of German, Danish and EFL. In 2000 he completed an MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia and he has mostly been working as a freelance translator of Scandinavian languages ever since. Authors he has translated are: Ingvar Ambjørnsen, Lars Saabye Christensen, Kjell Ola Dahl, Unni Drougge, Jakob Ejersbo, Jonny Halberg, Trude Marstein, Jo Nesbø, Pernille Rygg, and Bjørg Vik.

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). Her bilingual anthology Six Czech Poets is forthcoming from Arc Publications in September 2007.

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.

Daniel Hahn 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.

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.

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.

Christine Shuttleworth was born in Cambridge, to German- and Austrian-born parents, and brought up in London and Berlin. After several years in-house in book and magazine publishing she went freelance as a professional indexer and translator, working for clients in the UK, Germany and the United States. Her translations from German range from Fanny von Arnstein: A Daughter of the Enlightenment 1758-1818, by Hilde Spiel (Berg Publishing, 1991) to Benjamin and Brecht, by Erdmut Wizisla (Libris, in press). She is a Fellow of the Society of Indexers and a member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders and the Royal Society of Literature. For five years she was executive editor of the international journal The Indexer.

Amanda Hopkinson ex-officio, editor In Other Words

Secretary: Jo McCrum

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