-
Mona De Pracontal, French Tutor
Mona graduated in English and American Studies in Paris, and in film history and filmmaking in New York, where she lived for 3 years. She started translating when a student and has not stopped since, with forays into the film industry and, more recently, conference interpreting. Her major translations include works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Hannah Tinti, Cynan Jones, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, Rick Riordan, Frank Baum, Melvin Burgess, Howard Norman, Kaye Gibbons, Hanif Kureishi, Neil Hegarty and Nathaniel Miller, as well as non-fiction by William Burroughs, Gloria Steinem and Eve Ensler. She was awarded the Baudelaire Prize for literary translation in 2009 for Half of A Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and the Prix de traduction de la Fondation irlandaise 2019 for her translation of Nothing on Earth, by Conor O'Callaghan. In recent years, she has become more involved in the literary translators community, co-organising events and facilitating round tables, workshops and translation duels.
-
Waltraud Kolb, German Tutor
Waltraud Kolb studied translation (English, French, Portuguese/German) and holds a PhD in comparative literature. She is Assistant Professor of Literary Translation at the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna; she has been teaching at the Centre since 2007, and one current focus of her academic research is on literary translation processes. She started as a freelance translator in 1985 and has worked in a variety of fields, including literature, non-fiction and audiovisual translation. Recent literary translations include texts by Claudia Rankine, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Deb Olin Unferth, and Lima Barreto. She is also a member of the executive board of the Austrian Association of Literary Translators.
-
Leonardo Marcello Pignataro, Italian Tutor
Leonardo is a literary and audiovisual translator from English and Russian into Italian. In the past 30 years he has translated over 60 works for major Italian publishers: novels, essays, art catalogues, theological treatises and poetry, as well as many pieces of journalism. Since 2008, he has translated dozens of TV and film scripts for dubbing, including Game of Thrones, as well as entire TV and documentary series. Among the writers he’s translated are F. Scott Fitzgerald, V.S. Naipaul, Samuel Beckett, Norman Lewis, Leo Tolstoy, Pavel Florensky, Eugene Vodolazkin and Anton Chekhov. Since 2013, Leonardo has been teaching literary and AVT translation at universities, training schools and agencies, and has been invited to give workshops, lectures and talks on translating and the translator’s profession. In 2022 he was awarded the FIT Aurora Borealis Prize for Outstanding Translation of Non-Fiction Literature, for his translation of the four CUP volumes of Samuel Beckett’s Letters.
-
Carlos Mayor, Spanish Tutor
Since 1989, Carlos Mayor has translated or co-translated over 400 books by authors such as Andrea Camilleri, Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maugham, Cesare Pavese, Beatrix Potter, Gianni Rodari, Vita Sackville-West, Françoise Sagan, Saki, Edith Wharton and Oscar Wilde, as well as six Nobel-Prize winners: Albert Camus, Grazia Deledda, Rudyard Kipling, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and John Steinbeck. He translates fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels and children’s books into both Spanish and Catalan. He has won the Esther Benítez Award, the Astrid Lindgren Prize and the Antifaz Award. He has been teaching translation since 1992 and has given numerous workshops and lectures on different aspects of literary translation.
