Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Judges 2025
Susan Bassnett
Susan Bassnett is a writer and scholar of comparative literature and translation studies. She is Honorary Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow, and Professor Emerita at the University of Warwick. Author of over 20 books, her Translation Studies has been widely translated and is a book of global importance in the field. Her most recent books are Debates in Translation, co-edited with David Johnstone (Routledge, 2024), Writing Forward:Translation, Performance, Creativity, co-edited with Piotr Blumczynski (Routledge, 2025) and Tales of Travellers and Translators (Legenda, MHRA, 2025). She has served as judge on many international literary prizes,and is an elected Fellow of the Academia Europaea, the Institute of Linguists and the Royal Society of Literature. Since 2016 she has been President of the British Comparative Literature Association.
Véronique Tadjo
Véronique Tadjo is an author, artist and scholar. Born in Paris, she grew up in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Most of her novels are translated into English and several other languages. She has lived in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, where she was Head of French and Francophone Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (2007-2015). Her novel, In the Company of Men (English translation of En compagnie des hommes), on the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and the South African National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Best Fiction in 2023. Her new title, Je remercie la nuit, was published in Montreal in 2024. She now shares her time between London, Paris and Abidjan.
Boyd Tonkin
Boyd Tonkin is a journalist, editor and writer who was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2020 for outstanding service to literature over the course of a career. He currently writes on books and arts for international media including The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian, The Spectator and Times Literary Supplement, and was formerly Literary Editor and Senior Writer at The Independent. He chaired the Man Booker International Prize 2016 and then served as the prize’s Special Adviser. Since 2017 he has been a judge of Warwick University’’s Women in Translation prize. He has served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, and as a trustee of the Orwell Foundation. His reader’s guide to global fiction, The 100 Best Novels in Translation, is published by Galileo.