Speakers

• Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

  Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp is a British literary translator working into English from Arabic, Russian and German. Her translation of The Raven’s Children by Yulia Yakovleva was awarded an IBBY Honour title, and her translations have been shortlisted for the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize and the GLLI Translated YA Prize. She has several times been awarded a PEN Translates grant for her translations, which include fiction, nonfiction and children’s books from Germany, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Russia, Switzerland, and Syria. Her most recent translations were Brothers by Jackie Thomae (DAS Editions), a new translation of Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Penguin Classics), and Christina Wolff’s The Ghosts of Pandora Pickwick (Arctis).
• David Colmer

  David Colmer is an Australian translator and writer who lives in Amsterdam. He translates mostly Dutch literature in a range of genres and has published almost a hundred book-length translations, some of them very short. Colmer has won several major prizes, including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (both with novelist Gerbrand Bakker) and Australian and Dutch awards for his body of work.

• Cécile Deniard

  With a Master’s in political sciences (“Sciences-po” Paris, 1999) and literary translation (Paris VII, Institut Charles-V, 2002), Cécile has been a professional literary translator (English–French) since 2002. She has published more than 50 translations of prominent fiction and non-fiction authors, including Andrew O’Hagan, Lisa Gardner and Neil Price, with major publishing houses. As the treasurer and then vice-president of the ATLF (French Association of Literary Translators) 2004–2016, she focused on literary translators’ remuneration, as well as their working and contractual conditions, notably participating in the drafting of the new Code of Practices for Literary Translation signed with the representatives of French publishers in 2012. She is now a representative of ATLF with CEATL (the European Council of Literary Translators Associations).
• Louisa Dunnigan

  Louisa Dunnigan is an Editorial Director and Head of Audio at Profile Books, an independent publisher based in London. She publishes intelligent and compelling non-fiction across a range of genres, including current affairs, history and psychology as well as books with a business angle, narrative or practical, that look at behaviour and big ideas. Books that she has published have appeared on the Sunday Times bestseller lists, been translated around the world, and been shortlisted for, or won, the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, the Theatre Book Prize, the André Simon Book Award, and the Business Book of the Year Award. She looks for books that seek to change individuals’ lives or society at large, open up new conversations, challenge, inspire and delight. 
• Lauren L. Finch

  Lauren L. Finch is the director of the Lingua translation project at Global Voices, an international nonprofit that publishes stories to build understanding across borders. Whenever the clock is feeling generous, she can also be found translating literature and theatre from Spanish into English. Her translation of "La grieta, entre animales salvajes" won the 2020 Plays In Translation Contest, organized by the Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre and the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Her translation of "El paseo de Joe Strummer" was reviewed as "virtuoso" by BroadwayWorld. She holds undergraduate degrees in journalism and Hispanic language and literatures from Boston University, and a master's in translation from the Complutense University of Madrid. She currently sits on the reading committee of ALTA's Plays in Translation Contest, and in 2021, she attended the Bristol Translates Literary Translation Summer School. Originally from the U.S., she has called Spain home since 2011.

• Will Firth

  Will Firth was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1965. His focus as a literary translator is on contemporary writing from the Serbo-Croatian speaking countries and North Macedonia. He graduated in German and Russian (with Serbo-Croatian as a minor) from the Australian National University in Canberra. He read South Slavic studies at the University of Zagreb in 1988–89 and spent a further postgraduate year at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow. Since 1990 he has been living in Germany and working as a freelance translator of literature and the humanities. He translates from Russian, Macedonian and all variants of Serbo-Croatian (aka ‘BCMS’) into English, occasionally into German. In 2005-08 he worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Firth is a member of professional associations in Germany (VdÜ) and the UK (Translators Association). His best-received translations of recent years have been Tatjana Gromača’s Divine Child and Andrej Nikolaidis’s Anomaly.
• Will Forrester

  Will Forrester is Head of Literature Programmes at English PEN. He is also a Director of Untold Narratives and an Independent Expert for Creative Europe. He edited All Walls Collapse: Stories of Separation (2022), led the editorial team for My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women (2022), and has been a judge for the TA First Translation Prize and the US National Translation Award. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, London Magazine, and elsewhere.
• Catherine Fuller

  Catherine Fuller is a Senior Contracts Advisor at the Society of Authors with a particular focus on literary translation. She also co-ordinates the SoA’s Translators Association group representing nearly 800 members. She previously worked at the British Centre for Literary Translation where she managed the annual Summer School and Sebald Lecture.
• Anna Ganley

  As Chief Executive, Anna leads the Society of Authors, the UK’s largest trade union for all types of writers, illustrators and literary translators, at all stages of their careers. Together with her team, Anna works to empower and support authors across the UK. Anna sits on the boards of the Creators’ Rights Alliance, the International Authors Forum and the London Book Fair Advisory Board. Born in Sunderland, Anna grew up on the north-east coast but now lives in the Midlands.
• Kotryna Garanasvili

  Kotryna Garanasvili is a writer, translator, and interpreter working with English, Lithuanian, French, German, Russian, and Georgian. She is an Assistant Professor of literature and translation, teaching at Vilnius University and University of East Anglia, where she has received a PhD in literary translation and serves as a member of the BCLT Research Group. She is a mentor as well as a previous mentee of the Emerging Translator Mentorship at the National Centre for Writing and has been awarded traineeships at the EU Council and the European Parliament. More about Kotryna here: https://kotrynagaranasvili.wordpress.com.
• Susan Harris

  Susan Harris is the editorial director of Words Without Borders https://wordswithoutborders.org/ and the coeditor, with Ilya Kaminsky, of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.

• Karen Leeder

  Karen Leeder is Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German at the University of Oxford. She translates modern German literature, especially poetry, and her publications include work by Volker Braun, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Durs Grünbein, Michael Krüger, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Evelyn Schlag, and Raoul Schrott. Her work with Durs Grünbein has lasted for more than a decade and has been awarded the Stephen Spender (2011), the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize (2018) and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (2021) for Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City. Her first translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig (Thick of it, 2018) was awarded the PEN EUNIC New Voices award, a PEN Heim award and was runner-up for the Schlegel-Tieck prize. Their latest outing Shining Sheep was shortlisted for the ALTA poetry prize 2024. Her most recent publication is Grünbein’s Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 (2024) and Seagull Books will bring out his memoir of life in the GDR, The Zoo Years, in 2025.
• Sophie Lewis

  Sophie Lewis is a London-born translator and freelance editor. Working from French and Portuguese, she has translated books by Stendhal, Jules Verne, Marcel Aymé, Violette Leduc, Leïla Slimani, Noémi Lefebvre, Nastassja Martin, Mona Chollet, Josephine Baker and Annie Ernaux, also Sheyla Smanioto, Victor Heringer and Patrícia Melo, among others. For six years she was principal editor at publisher And Other Stories, and her most recent in-house position was as managing editor at The Folio Society. With Gitanjali Patel, she co-founded the Shadow Heroes translation workshops enterprise. Lewis’s translations have been shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff and Republic of Consciousness prizes and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. In 2022, she won the French-American Foundation’s prize for non-fiction translation.
• Antonia Lloyd-Jones

  Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.
• Dredhëza Maloku

  Dredhëza Maloku is Editor at Daunt Books, where she publishes literary fiction and non-fiction in English and in translation. Recent titles of hers include the Daunt anthology series, as well as, most recently, a reissue of Vivian Gornick's seminal memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, with a foreword by Amy Key. Last year she published a personal collection of essays by Cynthia Zarin called In Italy, as well as Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah. Next year, she is set to publish Uruguayan debut novelist, Eugenia Ladra's, hypnotic novel, Bait, translated from Spanish by Miriam Tobin. She previously worked at Vintage, on the Harvill Secker Crime and translated fiction list and at the moment she is on the lookout for compelling and immediate literary fiction in translation, in the vein of Pilar Quintana's Abyss, with a vested interest in emerging writers in Eastern Europe. 
• Stella Sabin

  Stella Sabin is co-publisher at Peirene Press. She started at Peirene in 2018 and took over the press with James Tookey in 2022. She is the commissioning editor of over a dozen books, including Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp (tr. Jo Heinrich), which won the Dublin Literature Award in 2023, and The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer (tr. James Young), which was awarded the Jabuti Prize for best Brazilian book published abroad. She has a background in radio production and has made documentaries and audiobooks for the BBC and independent clients.
• Damion Searls

  Damion Searls has translated sixty books of literature and philosophy from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, including the work of Jon Fosse and seven other Nobel Prize winners. He is the author of The Philosophy of Translation (Yale, 2024) as well as fiction, poetry, a biography of Hermann Rorschach and history of the Rorschach test, and essays; a novel, Analog Days, and a poetry chapbook, The Mariner’s Mirror, are being published this year. He has received Guggenheim, Cullman Center, and two (U.S.) National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Helen and Kurt Wolff prize and the Schlegel-Tieck prize (twice) for translations from German, and has taught at Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, Wesleyan, Naropa, and elsewhere.

• Sandra Smith

  Sandra Smith has published over forty translations, including Suite Française and 12 other novels by Irène Némirovsky, But You Did Not Come Back (Marceline Loridan-Ivens), The Necklace and Other Stories: Maupassant for Modern Times, The Outsider (Albert Camus), Inseparable (Simone de Beauvoir), In the Shadow of Paris (Anne Sinclair), among others. Smith has won the French American Translation Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Independent British Booksellers Book of the Year and the National Jewish Book Award. She taught at Cambridge University for many years before returning to the US. She is currently co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee.
• Carol O'Sullivan

  Carol O'Sullivan is Associate Professor in Translation Studies at the University of Bristol where she teaches graduate and advanced undergraduate modules in translation theory, subtitling and Italian to English translation. She has published widely on audiovisual translation, translation history, literary translation and public representations and perceptions of translation. Her books include Translating Popular Film (2011) and The Translation of Films 1900-1950 (2019, co-edited with Jean-François Cornu). She is the Principal Investigator of the UK Subtitling Audiences and Reception Network project funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (2024-5).
• Amélie Trémelo

  Amélie Trémelo is a language services professional with experience in translation, project management, and partnership development in the humanitarian and non-profit sectors. At CLEAR Global, she leads global partnerships and communication efforts that support aid organizations worldwide. With a background spanning agency work and field coordination in crisis zones like Nigeria, she champions language inclusion as a key to more effective and equitable humanitarian response. CLEAR Global is a nonprofit helping people access information and be heard, whatever language they speak, supported by a community of over 100,000 volunteer linguists. 
• Helen Vassallo

  Helen Vassallo is Associate Professor of French and Translation at the University of Exeter (United Kingdom). She is the author of Towards a Feminist Translator Studies: Intersectional Activism in Translation and Publishing, and a translator of Francophone women’s writing, with particular focus on North Africa and the Middle East. Her translations include a collection of Leïla Slimani’s non-fiction, two plays by Darina Al Joundi, and a fictional biography of pioneering Arab feminist May Ziadeh. Her first translation from Spanish is forthcoming in 2025, in La Lucha: Latin American Feminism Today, a ground-breaking anthology from Charco Press. Helen is the founder of Translating Women, and writes reviews and opinion pieces for a range of outlets. She recently collaborated with English PEN on an AHRC-funded network which brought together academics and industry stakeholders to address challenges to diversity in translated fiction, working towards issue 2 of the new digital platform PEN Presents.
• Morten Visby

  Morten Visby, b. 1973, lives and works in Copenhagen. Since 2002, freelance literary translator from English, German, Norwegian and Swedish. Most recent works include George Orwell’s essays and Angela Merkel’s memoirs. Former chair of The Danish Translators’ Association 2013–17, former president of CEATL (Conseil Européen des Associations de Traducteurs Littéraires) 2017–21 2017– Chair of The Danish Authors’ Association. Politically, Morten Visby has been mostly engaged in translators’ rights and working conditions with a strong emphasis on authors’ rights, collective management and book market dynamics, nor least in terms of Nordic-style book streaming. In the past couple of years, this focus has been very much centred on the rapidly growing use of machine translation and human post-editing. His reflections concern the impact of the technology on existing balances and roles in publishing, on translators’ conditions and on cultural support for literature.
• Anam Zafar

  Anam Zafar is a multi-award-winning translator from Arabic and French to English. She appears on the 100 Inspiring Muslims: Next Generation Edition list (Emerald Network/Aziz Foundation). Her co-translation with Nadiyah Abdullatif of Yoghurt and Jam, Or How My Mother Became Lebanese, Lena Merhej’s graphic memoir, won a PEN Translates Award, was shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize in Arabic Literary Translation and was longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Her co-translation of Josephine Baker’s memoir Fearless and Free, with Sophie Lewis, is out now with Vintage Classics/Tiny Reparations. Shorter translations appear in various places online and in print. Anam is also an editor, and leads workshops in creative translation and visual arts.