Speakers

• Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
  Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp is a literary translator who translates fiction and nonfiction into English from Arabic, Russian and German. She won an IBBY Honour List award in 2022 for her translation of The Raven’s Children by Yulia Yakovleva. Her work has also 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 and nonfiction from Germany, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Russia, Switzerland, and Syria. Her latest translations include Milk But No Honey by Hanna Harms (a graphic novel from The History Press), Brothers by Jackie Thomae (DAS Editions) and Split by Alida Bremer (Amazon Crossing).
• Rahul Bery
  Rahul Bery translates from Portuguese and Spanish into English. His published translations include novels by Vicente Luis Mora, Simone Campos, Afonso Cruz and David Trueba, and his work has been published in Granta, Words Without Borders, The White Review and The Stinging Fly, among others. He was translator-in-residence at the British Library from 2018 to 2019.
• Katharina Bielenberg
  Katharina is Publisher of MacLehose Press and the recently acquired Arcadia Books, both imprints of Quercus (Hachette Books). MacLehose Press publishes literary fiction, crime fiction and non-fiction almost exclusively in translation. Authors include Virginie Despentes, the late Daša Drndiƈ, Robert Menasse, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Maylis de Kerangal, Roy Jacobsen, Timur Vermes, Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Andrey Kurkov, Lars Mytting, Vasily Grossman, Daniela Krien, Nathacha Appanah, Muhsin al-Ramli, Judith Schalansky, Gauz, and Karin Smirnoff, the current author of the Millennium series begun by Stieg Larsson. Translated classics on the Arcadia list include Miklós Banffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy and Jaume Cabre’s Catalan masterpiece, Confessions, alongside English originals by Alex Wheatle, Joe Thomas and Edward Wilson, among others.
• Elizabeth Briggs
  Elizabeth Briggs is Editorial Director at Saqi Books. Working in the publishing industry for the past decade, her experience spans agenting and the non-for-profit literary sector alongside seven cherished years at Saqi. She has collaborated with some of the industry’s most prominent voices and spoken at festivals including Hay-on-Wye, LBF and Essex Book Festival. Elizabeth has a degree in Classics from Durham University. You can find her on Twitter @litfactivist.
• Jen Calleja

• Ruth Clarke
  Ruth Clarke is a translator from Italian, French and Spanish. She has translated an eclectic range of work by authors from Benin to Venezuela, most recently Evelina Santangelo’s haunting novel From Another World. Ruth teaches on the MA in Translation Studies at Durham University and has been a mentor for the British Council’s Translation Fellowship. She promotes translation through New Spanish Books and Translate Swiss Books, and she is a founding member of The Starling Bureau, a collective of literary translators. In 2022/23 Ruth was Translator in Residence at New Writing North and Durham University. The Starling Bureau is a collective of literary translators founded in London in 2017 by Ruth Clarke, Zoë Perry, Roland Glasser, Paul Russell Garrett and Morgan Giles. Collaborating to find the world’s best literature, they work from Danish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Spanish.
• 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), where she coordinated a survey mapping the legal situation of literary translators around Europe (2022).
• Connor Doak
  Connor Doak is Senior Lecturer in Russian at University of Bristol. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages & Literatures from Northwestern University, USA. He works on Russian literature, culture and society from the Romantic period to the present day. He has a particular interest in cultural manifestations of gender and sexuality, and is pleased to be delivering a talk on Queer Translation at this year's Bristol Translates summer school.
• Janet Fraser
  Janet has a BA in translating and interpreting from Heriot-Watt University, an MA in Sociolinguistics, and an MA in Modern German Studies. She is a Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading, a Fellow of ITI and a Fellow of CIOL. Janet started her career living and working in Leipzig, followed by two in-house translation posts in London. Between 1980 and 1988, she worked as a multilingual journalist before joining the University of Westminster as Senior Lecturer in Translation, teaching translation and editing skills and leading the research thesis module. In 2010, she returned to translation, and now uses her wider language skills as a freelance translator, reviser, editor, proofreader and copywriter. Recent assignments include writing a glossy corporate magazine and copy-editing an art catalogue. Fun fact: Janet’s proudest linguistic achievement is mastering Egyptian hieroglyphs well enough to decipher funerary inscriptions in the Cairo Museum!
• 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. Photo © Michael Jershov
• Will Forrester
  Will Forrester is Translation and International Manager at English PEN. He co-edited All Walls Collapse: Stories of Separation (2022) and led the editorial team for Untold’s My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women (2022). He has worked in the visual arts in Malaysia and as an independent expert for the EU Commission’s Creative Europe programme. He is a Clore Emerging Leader 2022, a Bookseller Rising Star 2023, and an advisory board member at Sinoist Books. He is a judge for the 2023 TA First Translation Prize and the 2024 US National Translation Award. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, London Magazine, and elsewhere.
• William Gregory
  William Gregory is a translator from Spanish, specialising in contemporary theatre from Spain and Latin America.  Productions of his translations include The Bit-Players by José Sanchis Sinisterra (Southwark Playhouse, London), A Fight Against… by Pablo Manzi (Royal Court, London), B by Guillermo Calderón (Royal Court); Cuzco by Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez (Theatre503, London), and Chamaco by Abel González Melo (Home, Manchester). He was a Valle-Inclán Award finalist for The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Plays. Photo: Camila França 
• Janiça Hackenbuchner
  Janiça Hackenbuchner is an FWO fellow PhD researcher in machine translation at Ghent University. Her focus of research lies on machine translation systems and gender inclusiveness. Her broader research and interests also cover developments in NLP and fairness as well as data and digital literacy training. She is co-founder of the DeBiasByUs platform, a winning solution of the Goethe-Institut’s Artificially Correct Hackathon and co-organiser of the first Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies. She is spokesperson of an ELC Special Interest Group on ethical and legal implications of AI in translation, and member of an EU-funded Erasmus+ project on digital literacy in language technology. Prior to her PhD she was operative lead of the DataLitMT Project, teaching data literacy in the context of machine translation literacy. She holds an MA in Specialised Translation and a BA in Sciences, and has experience teaching at the BA and MA level.

• Ralph Krüger
  Ralph Krüger is Professor of Language and Translation Technology at the Institute of Translation and Multilingual Communication at TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Germany. He received his PhD in translation studies from the University of Salford, UK, in 2014 and completed his habilitation at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, in 2024. His current research focuses on the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) and large language models (LLMs) in the specialised translation process and on didactic strategies and resources for teaching the technical basics of NMT/LLMs to students from translation and specialised communication programmes. Photo © Thilo Schmülgen/TH Köln

• Ian MacDonald
  Ian has been translating Japanese fiction and non-fiction for over thirty years and holds a doctorate in Japanese literature and art history from Stanford. He has also worked extensively in commercial media, advertising, and business localisation. His published works include The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshichi, “Japan’s Sherlock Holmes”, and, along with Ginny Tapley Takemori, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, which was longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. He grew up in the US, has lived in Japan, Sri Lanka, and Singapore, and now calls London home.
• Sheela Mahadevan
  Sheela Mahadevan is Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at Liverpool University. Her research interests include the theory and practice of translation, multilingualism and contemporary Francophone literatures. She holds BA and Master’s degrees in French and German literatures from Oxford University, and a PhD in Francophone Literatures and Translation Studies from King’s College London, which was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She has previously taught translation at Oxford University and King’s College London, and was awarded the University of Chicago Outstanding Educator Award in 2016. Her translation of a multilingual Indian Francophone novel Carnet secret de Lakshmi is forthcoming with Columbia University Press in 2024, and her book entitled Writing between Languages: Multilingualism and Translation in Indian Francophone Writing is forthcoming with Bloomsbury as part of the ‘Advances in Translation’ series.
• Zoe Perry
  Zoë Perry’s translations of contemporary Portuguese-language literature have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, The New York Times and The White Review. Recent book translations include Sevastopol by Emilio Fraia and Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia, which won the inaugural Cercador Prize. She and Julia Sanches are currently co-translating Diorama by Brazilian novelist Carol Bensimon.
• Nick Rosenthal
  Nick Rosenthal translates from German and French, and occasionally from Dutch. A professional translator since 1986, he is a Fellow and past chair of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting. Nick’s career has seen him work as a staff translator in East Germany, as a freelance translator and running a boutique translation company. He has a strong commitment to translator training and professional development. In the literary world, Nick has a passion for gritty crime fiction. Nick worked for the National Autistic Society for 2 years and was interim CEO of a small autism charity in Cumbria. He runs regular autism awareness sessions for social workers and healthcare staff, and is co-chair of his local authority Autism Partnership Board. Nick particularly enjoys running post-diagnostic support groups, helping newly diagnosed autistic adults explore their identity. Nick spends half his time translating, and half his time working in a range of roles across the neurodiversity sector.
• Julia Sanches
  Julia Sanches translates literature from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan into English. Recent translations include The Time of Cherries by Montserrat Roig and Living Things by Munir Hachemi. Born in Brazil, she resides in the United States and works part time as the rights director of Tilted Axis Press. She and Zoë Perry are currently co-translating Diorama by Carol Bensimon from Brazilian Portuguese.
• Maboula Soumahoro
  Maboula Soumahoro is an associate professor in the English dept. of the University of Tours & president of the Black History Month Association. A specialist in Africana Studies, she has conducted research & taught in universities & prisons in the USA & France. She is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), translated by Dr. Kaiama L. Glover as Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021) & winner of the 2020 FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize. Maboula was the inaugural Villa Albertine Resident in Atlanta (2021–22); Mellon Arts Project International Visiting Professor of African American & African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University; Visiting Faculty at Bennington College (2022–23) & is currently a fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Ideas & Imagination. She has translated Saidiya Hartman’s classic, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route into French. Photo © Patricia Khan
• Claire Storey
  Claire Storey translates from German, Spanish and Catalan into English, specialising in middle grade and young adult literature. In 2021/22, she was awarded funding from Arts Council England for a successful translation and pitching project focusing on Young Adult Literature from Latin America. Claire acts as an international book scout in this field, seeking out and presenting suitable German, Spanish and Catalan-language books to English-speaking publishers. Alongside her translation work, Claire works part-time as a Product Executive for Rayburn Tours, a travel company specialising in educational group travel, which happily involves regular trips to mainland Europe from her base in the East Midlands. She regularly volunteers in schools talking about careers with languages and was named Outreach Champion 2021 by the Institute of Translation and Interpreting. Website www.clairestoreylanguages.co.uk
• Clare Suttie
  Clare set up Atlas Translations in 1991, and has been finding all the best translators and interpreters for a wide variety of happy clients ever since.   Clare is advocate of human connection and communication, active marketing for freelancers, and encourages suppliers to get better at self-promotion. She offers group and individual business clinics, with advice on CVs, LinkedIn profiles, researching clients and communicating services.  You can find Clare on LinkedIn where she posts some useful bits and pieces, and photos of her chickens seem to go down well.
• Ginny Tapley Takemori
  Ginny Tapley Takemori is a freelance literary translator and, with Allison Markin Powell and Lucy North, a member of the collective Strong Women Soft Power which aims to promote Japanese women writers and their translators. Her translation of Sayaka Murata’s Akutagawa prizewinning novel Convenience Store Woman was awarded the 2020–21 Lindsey and Masao Miyoshi Prize as well as being shortlisted for numerous other prizes including the 2019 Indies Choice and Best Translated Book Awards. Her co-translation with Ian MacDonald of Kyoko Nakajima’s Things Remembered and Things Forgotten was longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. She lives in rural Japan with her husband and three cats.
• Laura Watkinson
  Laura loves reading and translating children’s and YA books. She has translated all kinds of books for younger readers, from picture books to YA thrillers, and has worked with publishers all over the world. Two of her career highlights have been going to see the filming for the Netflix series of The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt, which she translated for Pushkin Press, and the shortlisting of her translation of Annet Schaap’s Lampie (also Pushkin Press) for the Carnegie Medal, the first translated book to be nominated for the award since it was established in 1936. Three of her translated books have won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award: Bibi Dumon Tak’s Mikis and the Donkey and Soldier Bear (Eerdmans) and Truus Matti’s Mister Orange (Enchanted Lion). Laura lives in a tall, thin house on a canal in Amsterdam with her husband, her cat, and lots of shelves of lovely books.