Biographical details of tutors

Chinese

Nicky Harman
Nicky Harman lives in the UK. She has worked as a literary translator for a dozen years and, until the spring of 2011, also lectured on the MSc in Scientific, Technical and Medical Translation at Imperial College London. Now, in addition to translating, she 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] for three successive years (2009-2011) and in 2011 was Translator-in-Residence at London Free Word Centre. She was workshop leader for Chinese at the UYLUYE summer school 2012.

Her recent translations include the prize-winning novel Gold Mountain Blues (金山) by Zhang Ling (Penguin Canada/Atlantic Books UK, 2012); Flowers of War, by Yan Geling (Harvill Secker UK, 2012), A New Development Model and China's Future (新发展方式与中国的未来) (non-fiction) by Deng Yingtao, and A Phone Call from Dalian, Han Dong's Collected Poems (Zephyr Press, 2012). She also translated Han Dong’s first novel Banished! (扎根) (University of Hawai’i Press, 2009). This won a PEN Translation Fund Award (2006) and was longlisted for Man Asian Literary Prize, 2008. She regularly translates for Ou Ning's literary journal, Chutzpah (天南), and for Words without Borders, and has translated Hong Ying and Xinran. She acted as judge on the Harvill Secker Young Translator Prize in the same year.

 

French

Ros Schwartz

Ros Schwartz has been a freelance translator from French since 1981 and has translated a wide range of Francophone authors including Andrée Chedid, Catherine Clément, Dominique Eddé, Sébastien Japrisot, Malika Oufkir, Aziz Chouaki, Yasmina Khadra, Dominique Manotti (whose Lorraine Connection won the 2008 International Dagger Award), Jaqueline Harpman, Fatou Diome, Sembène Ousmane and Claudine Vegh. Her recently published translation of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince has been shortlisted for the 2013 Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation. She was Chair of CEATL, the Conseil Européen des Associations de Traducteurs Littéraires from 2000 to 2009, Chair of the Advisory Panel to the British Centre for Literary Translation from 2005 to 2009 and is currently Chair of English PEN’s Writers in Translation Programme and a trustee of English PEN.

Ros publishes articles and frequently gives workshops and talks on literary translation around the world. In 2009 she was given the distinction of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Trista Selous


Trista Selous completed her PhD on Marguerite Duras in 1985, and reworked it for publication as The Other Woman in 1988. By this time she was already making her living as a translator. Her academic translations include books on history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art history and film, and articles in fields ranging from human rights to Catholic theology, including regular work for the International Social Sciences Journal. She is the associate editor of two multidisciplinary co-authored books, to which she also contributed translations and original articles. In a very different vein, her translation of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s prizewinning ‘auto-fiction’ No One was published in 2012, and she has translated several personal stories for the popular market. Throughout her career she has worked for the British Film Institute, initially translating film dialogues and performing earphone commentaries, later writing subtitles. She interprets for visiting actors and directors at press events and onstage at the London Film Festival.

In parallel to translation, she has taught at a range of higher education institutions, including a four-year stint in the Modern Languages department of what is now Roehampton University, where she taught courses in French film, literature, language and translation. She has also run translation workshops at the BCLT and Use your language, Use your English Summer Schools. She currently teaches French to adult beginners at City Lit.

 

German

Jamie Lee Searle (German academic)


Jamie Lee Searle is a freelance translator of fiction and non-fiction, and also teaches part-time at Queen Mary, University of London in modules relating to German language, translation and British culture. Forthcoming publications include a translation of Ursula Poznanski’s Fünf for Harvill Secker, and co-translations, with Shaun Whiteside, of Frank Schätzing’s Limit and Florian Illies’ 1913. She also translates academic papers and essays, primarily in the fields of art history, literary criticism and social anthropology, for institutes such as the Bern Hochschule der Künste. Currently based in London, she blogs at http://translatingbetweenthelines.wordpress.com/.

After having studied German at the University of Exeter, Jamie worked for Reuters for two years, translating news releases on mergers and acquisitions within the German-language financial markets. She then completed an MA in Anglo-German Cultural Relations at Queen Mary, for which her thesis on Timothy Garton Ash and his publications on the GDR was given the 2010 Jethro Bithell Award. Alongside her translation work, she also takes on research commissions within the German academic field. Current projects include research for an exhibition of German migration to the UK. Together with fellow translators Rosalind Harvey and Anna Holmwood, she co-founded the Emerging Translators Network in late 2010.

Shaun Whiteside (German literary)
Shaun Whiteside graduated with a First in Modern Languages from King’s College Cambridge in 1982. He has translated many works of fiction, philosophy, psychoanalysis and art criticism from German, French, Italian and Dutch. His translation of Magdalena the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1997. His recent translations from German include The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink (Knopf, Weidenfeld) and the thriller Sorry by Zoran Drvenkar (Knopf, Blue Door). He is currently working on the translation of The Giraffe’s Neck by Judith Schalansky for Bloomsbury.

Italian

Howard Curtis
Howard Curtis has translated more than sixty books from Italian, French and Spanish, including works by Luigi Pirandello, Beppe Fenoglio, Leonardo Sciascia, Gianrico Carofiglio, Pietro Grossi, Giorgio Scerbanenco, Michele Giuttari, Donato Carrisi, Giorgio Faletti, Filippo Bologna, Marella Caracciolo Chia, Fabio Geda, Paolo Sorrentino, Alessandro Perissinotto, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, André Malraux, Georges Simenon, Jean-Claude Izzo, Jean-François Parot, Marek Halter, Caroline Lamarche, Carole Martinez, Marc Dugain, Caryl Férey, Luis Sepúlveda, Santiago Gamboa and Francisco Coloane.

He has won the John Florio Prize and the Premio Campiello Europa, and has been nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He led workshops at the BCLT Summer School in 2006 and was a mentor in the 2012 and 2013 BCLT Mentorship Scheme.

Japanese

Angus Turvill has taught Japanese translating for nine years. He led Newcastle University's MA programme in Japanese Translating and Interpreting and now teaches literary and non-literary Japanese translation at Durham University. Previously he worked in business. He has degrees from Edinburgh and Birkbeck. He won Grand Prize in the Shizuoka International Translation Competition (2005), the J-Lit Translation Competition (2007) and the Kurodahan Translation Competition (2011). He was runner-up in the 2006 John Dryden Competition. Prize-winning and published translations include fiction by Ekuni Kaori, Mukoda Kuniko, Dazai Osamu. Matsuda Aoko, Shigematsu Kiyoshi and Kamon Nanami; non-fiction by Ikezawa Natsuki; and poetry by Nomura Kiwao and Yotsumoto Yasuhiro.

 

Polish

Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a translator of Polish literature. Her published translations include fiction by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists, including The Last Supper by Paweł Huelle, for which she won the Found in Translation Award 2008. Her translations of non-fiction include reportage, literary biographies and essays. She also translates poetry and books for children, including illustrated books, novels and verse. Since January 2011 she has been a committee member for the Translators Association.

She has taught occasional translation classes in Krakow and in London. In April 2011 she ran two translation workshops for primary school children within the Translation Nation project (organised by Eastside Educational Trust), and in June 2011 she gave a translation seminar for graduate students of Polish from London and Glasgow Universities. She has recently been mentoring a younger translator under the British Centre for Literary Translation's mentorship scheme, and has been invited by the Polish Cultural Institute to take on a new ‘mentee’ in 2013.

Portuguese

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty-five years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramón del Valle-Inclán. She has won various prizes for her work, including, in 2008, the PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Award and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of Eça de Queiroz’s masterpiece The Maias, and, most recently, the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Elephant’s Journey by José Saramago. She has just completed translations of Javier Marías’ most recent novel Los enamoramientos [The Infatuations] José Saramago’s early work Levantado do chão [Raised from the Ground], and Tristana by the nineteenth-century Spanish author Benito Pérez Galdós. She often leads translation workshops, has been the Portuguese tutor on the UYLUYE course for the past two years, and is part of the BCLT mentorship scheme for Spanish and Portuguese.

Russian

Robert Chandler

Robert Chandler’s translations of Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire are published in the series ‘Everyman’s Poetry’, and his own poems have been published in the TLS and other journals. His translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman’s The Road, Everything Flows, An Armenian Sketchbook and Life and Fate, Nikolay Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Aleksander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. His translation of Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway won the AATSEEL (American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages) translation prize for 2007 and received a special commendation from the judges of the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize. Andrey Platonov’s Soul, of which Robert Chandler is a co-translator, won the AATSEEL prize in 2004, as well as being shortlisted for the 2005 Rossica Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld European Translation Prize. Robert Chandler is the editor of two anthologies for Penguin Classics, of Russian short stories and Russian magic tales, and he is the author of Alexander Pushkin (in the Hesperus ‘Brief Lives’ series). For the last six years he has taught classes in literature and in translation at Queen Mary, University of London. He also works as a mentor for the new BCLT mentorship scheme. He is currently translating more works by Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov, as well as compiling a third anthology for Penguin Classics, of Russian poetry.

Spanish

Nick Caistor
Nick Caistor has an Honours Degree in French Studies (Reading 1968); a Licence de linguistique appliquée (Besançon 1975) and an MA in Hispanic Studies from the University of London (1982). He has translated more than 35 works of fiction and non-fiction from the Spanish and French by writers including Jaun Carlos Onetti, Eduardo Mendoza, Manuel V'azquez Montalban and Juan Mars'e, winning the Valle Inclan Spanish Translation prize in 2007 and 2008. He produced the English version of Nunca Mas, the report on the disappeared in Argentina during the 1970s military dictatorship. Nick Caistor has also taught writing skills at several universities in the United Kingdom.

Swedish

Kevin Halliwell holds degrees from the Universities of Lancaster and Milan and taught at University level in France and Italy before relocating to Brussels where he worked as an EU linguist for 14 years, translating mainly from French, Italian and Swedish. He has translated works by contemporary Swedish writers Cecilia Parkert, Björn Runge, Klas Abrahamsson, Marianne Goldman and Michael Azar, and won the Gate Theatre Translation Award in 2002 with a translation of Cecilia Parkert’s Vittne. He is a member of the Translators Association, the Chartered Institute of Linguists and of SELTA (Swedish-English Literary Translators' Association). He is also a Visiting Lecturer in translation at the University of Westminster.

Editing

Alexa Alfer

Alexa Alfer is an experienced professional translator and editor, specialising in academic translation (literary criticism, philosophy, art, art history, history of medicine and science). In addition to her freelance practice, she is Senior Lecturer in Translation at the University of Westminster, where she has taught practical translation and editing modules as well as translation theory since 2002.

Alexa’s research interests are informed by her background in literary studies. She is the author, together with Amy J. Edwards, of a monograph on A. S. Byatt (Manchester UP, 2011) and is currently developing a new research project on the scholarly, commercial and broader cultural motivations that lie behind decisions to commission or undertake re-translations of classic literary texts. Focusing on the English translations and re-translations of the works of 19th-century German writer Theodor Fontane, the project also considers the changing face and politics of literary translation in the English-speaking world over the past 150 years, as well as the broader context of the reception of German literature and culture in Britain.

Janet Fraser
After gaining a BA in Modern Languages (Interpreting and Translation), Janet Fraser worked as an in-house translator in both the private and the public sector and then as a multilingual journalist. In 1988, she joined the then Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster) as Senior Lecturer in Translation. There, she taught translation from both French and German into English, launched the first ‘Editing Skills’ module for translation students (now run in a number of language combinations), and was module leader for the ‘Developing Professionalism for Translators’ module and the MA Thesis. Since late 2010, she has been freelancing as a translator, editor/reviser, trainer and examiner. Her translation specialisms include education and training, overseas development, and corporate communications.

Janet is a Fellow and active member of both the Chartered Institute of Linguists and the Institute of Translation and Interpreting and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She holds the Institute of Linguists Educational Trust’s Diploma in Translation and has a Masters in Sociolinguistics and another in Modern German Studies. Perhaps the most demanding language learning she has ever done, however, was mastering Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs for a Diploma in Egyptology…

Jasper Tilbury

Jasper Tilbury graduated in Modern History from the University of St Andrews. Having won a research scholarship to the Jagiellonian University, he moved to Kraków in 1989 and lived there throughout the 1990s. During that time he wrote several cultural guidebooks about Eastern Europe for the Blue Guides series, including Blue Guide Poland and Blue Guide Prague, and also worked as a deputy editor for EMERGO: Journal of Transforming Economies and Societies, an English-language peer-review quarterly focussing on transition issues, published by Stockholm University’s School of Business. Since the mid-1990s he has worked as a Polish to English freelance translator specialising in academic translation, primarily in the fields of history, law and economics. He does regular work for a variety of private and public institutions, including the Polish Government, European Commission and European Parliament, and is currently translating a book by Zofia Wóycicka on Holocaust memory in post-war Poland (Peter Lang AG Switzerland, forthcoming). In addition to freelance work, he is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Westminster, where he teaches the institutional translation module for the MA in Bilingual Translation and the MA in Translation and Interpreting. He is also an assessor and moderator for candidates applying to become members of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting and the Chartered Institute of Linguists.