Tutor Biographies

Amanda Hopkinson

Co-director

Amanda Hopkinson has translated over forty books from Spanish, French, and Portuguese, specialising in Latin American authors, including Isabel Allende, Elena Poniatowska and Paulo Coelho. Her most recent translations (together with Sophie Hughes) are The Hole by Mexican author and activist José Revueltas [New Directions, October 2018] and Lisbon Tales – Lisbon as written by lusophone writers – for OUP’s City Tales series [May, 2019]. A former Professor of Literary Translation at City, University of London and director of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, she has been involved in organising Literary Translation Summer Schools at both universities since 2004. She also writes on Latin American popular culture, particularly on literature and photography. Photo credit: © Kurt Kaindl

Ros Schwartz

Summer School Co-Director and French tutor

Over the past four decades Ros Schwartz has translated over 90 fiction and non-fiction titles from French. In 2010, she published a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and her recent translated works include Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance and Selfies by Sylvie Weil. She is one of the team re-translating Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels for Penguin Classics. 2020 sees the translation of Jefferson, a YA book by Jean-Claude Mourlevat, and A Long Way from Douala by Max Lobe. She gives talks and masterclasses around the world and is a Royal Literary Fund fellow, based at King’s College London. In 2009 she was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2017 she was the recipient of the UK Institute of Translation and Interpreting’s John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence. Photo credit: © Anita Staff

Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

Arabic

Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp is a British literary translator working from German, Russian and Arabic into English. She has translated novels by Fadi Zaghmout, Ahlam Bsharat, Hanna Winter, Kathrin Rohmann, Katja Frixe and Yulia Yakovleva, and nonfiction by Peter Wohlleben, Olzhas Suleimenov, Samar Yazbek and Ulrich Raulff. Ruth graduated from the University of Oxford in 2003 and completed an MA in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Bath in 2004. Recent translations have included a feminist history of the world for The History Press, a comprehensive introduction to climate change, and a new translation of Wassily Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art for Penguin Classics.

Peter Bush

Catalan

Peter Bush has translated a number of Catalan modern classics including Mercè Rodoreda’s In Diamond Square, Joan Sales’s Uncertain Glory and Winds of the Night, Josep Pla’s Life Embitters and The Gray Notebook which won the 2014 Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation. Most recently published translations are Barcelona Tales and Quim Monzó’s Why? Why? Why? Jorge Carrión’s Against Amazon will be out in May. Current projects include Víctor Català’s Un film, 3000 metres (Catarina Albert), Najat El Hachmi’s Mare de mel i llet and Balzac’s Le Lys dans la vallée. In 2015 he was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi by the Catalan government for his translation and promotion of Catalan literature.

Nicky Harman

Chinese

Nicky Harman translates fiction, and occasionally non-fiction and poetry from Chinese. She is based in the UK, and before becoming a full-time literary translator, taught technical translation at Imperial College London University. Prize-winning authors she has translated include: A Yi (forthcoming), Anni Baobei (The Road of Others), Chan Koon-chung (The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver), Chen Xiwo (Book of Sins), Han Dong (A Phone Call from Dalian: Collected Poems), Jia Pingwa (Happy Dreams), Dorothy Tse (Snow and Shadow), Xinran (Letter from an Unknown Chinese Mother), Xu Xiaobin (Crystal Wedding), Xu Zhiyuan (Paper Tiger), and Yan Ge (The Chili Bean Paste Clan). She has won several awards, including the Mao Tai Cup People's Literature Chinese-English translation prize 2015, and the 2013 China International Translation Contest, Chinese-to-English section. When not translating, she spends time promoting contemporary Chinese fiction to the general English-language reader. She co-runs the website Paper-Republic.org, which offers resources for translators and general readers and has published a series of free-to- view short stories under the rubric Read Paper Republic; runs literary events and writes blogs; and gives talks at literary festivals and, especially, the Centre for New Chinese Writing at Leeds University. She also mentors new translators, teaches summer schools, and judges translation competitions. She tweets as the China Fiction Bookclub @cfbcuk. Photo © Julia Schönstädt

Ruth Martin

German

Ruth Martin has a PhD in German literature and philosophy, and has been translating fiction and non-fiction for a range of publishers in the UK and the US since 2009. Her most recent translations include The Coral Merchant, a collection of Joseph Roth’s short stories; Nino Haratischvili’s epic The Eighth Life (co-translated with Charlotte Collins); Dreamers by Volker Weidermann; Michael Köhlmeier’s novels Two Gentlemen on the Beach and Yiza, and a volume of essays by Hannah Arendt. She has taught translation at Birkbeck and the University of Kent, and is currently co-chair of the Society of Authors Translators Association. Photo © Michael Jershov

Angus Turvill

Japanese

Angus is a winner of the Shizuoka International, Kurodahan and J-Lit translation competitions. His translations include fiction by Kuniko Mukoda, Hisashi Inoue, Natsuko Kuroda, Kaori Ekuni, Mitsuyo Kakuta, Masatsugu Ono and Aoko Matsuda, as well as non-fiction by Marie Kondo’s decluttering inspiration, Nagisa Tatsumi, and poetry by Kiwao Nomura. He is editor of Heaven’s Wind, a dual-language anthology of short stories by leading Japanese authors. He teaches Japanese translating at Durham University.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Polish

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as 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. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and former co-chair of the UK Translators Association. Photo: © Susan Bernofsky

Robert Chandler

Russian

Robert Chandler has translated Sappho and a selection of Apollinaire for Everyman’s Poetry. His translations from Russian include many works by Vasily Grossman – two of which have been dramatized at length on BBC Radio 4 – and by Andrey Platonov. He has also compiled three anthologies for Penguin Classics: of Russian short stories, of Russian magic tales and of Russian Poetry. He is a co-translator of three volumes of memoirs and stories by Teffi and the author of a short biography of Alexander Pushkin. His translations have won prizes in both the UK and the USA and his own poems have appeared in the TLS and elsewhere. Teaching is increasingly important to him, and he runs a monthly translation workshop at Pushkin House (London).

Rosalind Harvey

Spanish

Rosalind Harvey is an award-winning literary translator from the Spanish. She is a 2018 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a 2016 Arts Foundation Fellow, and a founding member and chair of the Emerging Translators Network, a lively online community for early-career literary translators. She has been a judge for the Translators Association First Translation Prize, a lecturer in translation and Spanish at the Universities of Warwick and Bristol, and is a regular speaker on how to survive as a literary translator. Photo: © Rita Platts