Join acclaimed literary translators who have featured on prestigious shortlists and longlists to hear more about their translation practices and choices. They will discuss a short poem or passage that they recently translated, and give the audience insight into the “hows” and “whys” of their translatory approach! This year we are thrilled to be joined by Bryan Karetnyk, Celia Hawkesworth, Rosie Hedger, Rachael McGill, Nick Caistor, and Delija Valiukenas all shortlisted for the 2019 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. This session will be chaired by Karen Leeder.

Bryan Karetnyk is a Wolfson Scholar in the Humanities at University College London. He read Russian and Japanese at the University of Edinburgh. In recent years he has translated several major works by the émigré author Gaito Gazdanov, including The Spectre of Alexander Wolf (2013), The Buddha’s Return (2014) and The Flight (2016). He is also the editor and principal translator of the Penguin Classics anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (2017). His writing has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Spectator.

Rosie Hedger completed her MA (Hons) in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Rosie spent a year at the University of Oslo taking courses in Norwegian literature and researching for her dissertation on contemporary Norwegian fiction. Rosie was selected as a candidate for the British Centre for Literary Translation’s mentoring scheme for emerging translators in 2012, mentored by Don Bartlett. Rosie’s most recent translations have included work by Helga Flatland and Gine Cornelia Pedersen. Rosie’s translation of Agnes Ravatn’s The Bird Tribunal won an English PEN Translates Award in 2016 and was selected for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime. Her work has appeared in publications such as Words Without Borders, Asymptote and The Missing Slate.

Rachael McGill was born in the Shetland Islands. She lives with one foot in Britain, the other in Lisbon. She’s a playwright for stage and radio, prose writer and literary translator from French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. Her translation of The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk is published by Dedalus. Her play The Lemon Princess is published by Oberon, as are her translations of the Kerstin Specht plays Marieluise (which won the Gate Theatre/Allied Domecq Translation Award) and The Time of the Tortoise. She has had short fiction published in anthologies, literary magazines and online. Her first novel, Fair Trade Heroin, was longlisted for the Linen Press First Chapter Award. It is coming out soon.

Delija Valiukenas graduated from New York City’s Hunter College and earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from Brown University, where her doctoral dissertation explored the linguistic and cultural dynamics of translation, as manifested in the Lithuanian translations of Shakespeare. As a member of the faculty at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts for 34 years, she taught upper-level courses in her area of specialization—Shakespeare—as well as introductory courses, primarily, in American literature. She was involved in the development of an interdisciplinary program in the Holocaust and taught the Literature of the Holocaust until she retired. She has authored a Composition text (Random House) to address the problems of Freshman writing; written and translated articles for Baltic and Lithuanian journals; and was commissioned by the Lithuanian National Theatre of Kaunas to translate several Lithuanian plays into English.

Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and academic, and teaches German at New College, Oxford where she works especially on modern poetry and runs the project Mediating Modern Poetry. She translates contemporary German literature into English, including works by Volker Braun, Michael Krüger Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Raoul Schrott. Her most recent translations include Evelyn Schlag’s All Under one Roof (Carcanet) which was the PBS summer translation selection (2018) and she was awarded an English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translations from Ulrike Almut Sandig’s Dickicht (Thick of it) which appeared with Seagull in 2018. Her translations of Durs Grünbein stretch back over a decade and were awarded the Stephen Spender Prize (2011) and the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize (2018).