Sarah Ardizzone (Mentor: Quebec French/First Nations Languages)
Sarah Ardizzone is a translator from the French-speaking world with fifty-something titles to her name. Her literary work spans picture books, graphic novels and travel memoirs, as well as children’s, YA and grown-up fiction. Her time in Marseille led to a special interest in sharp dialogue and multi-heritage slang. Authors include Faïza Guène, Gaël Faye, Yasmina Reza, Daniel Pennac and Alexandre Dumas. Twice recipient of the Marsh award, she has won the Scott-Moncrieff prize and a New York Times notable book accolade. Sarah is a Royal Literary Fund Bridge Fellow, and former co-chair (Translators’ Advisory Group) for English PEN Translates. She currently develops live multilingual performances for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Sarah also has a long association with the Stephen Spender Trust, co-founding some of its educational programmes, including Translation Nation and Translators in Schools.
(c) Simon Ardizzone
Khairani Barroka (Mentor: D/deaf, Disabled or Neurodivergent Mentee)
Khairani Barokka is a chronically ill/disabled writer and artist based in London, and is Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and aims to centre disability justice as anticolonial praxis, and access as translation. Among her honours, she’s been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, National Centre for Writing Associate Artist, and an Artforum Must-See. Her books include Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (co-edited), Indigenous Species, Rope, and most recently, Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.
Polly Barton (Mentor: Japanese)
Polly Barton is a writer and Japanese translator, based in the UK. Her full-length translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (2017), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (2020), So We Look to the Sky by Misumi Kubo (2021), There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (2020), and Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai (2023). She was winner of the inaugural JLPP Translation Competition in 2012, and her translation of Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda won a World Fantasy Award. She is the author of Fifty Sounds (2021), which won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize, and Porn: An Oral History (2023), both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
(c) Garry Loughlin
Sean Gasper Bye (Mentor: Polish)
Sean Gasper Bye is a translator of Polish literature into English. He has translated books by authors including Małgorzata Szejnert, Szczepan Twardoch, Mikołaj Grynberg and others. His translations have won the EBRD Literary Prize and the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize, been shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and longlisted for the National Translation Award. He is a former National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow and Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University. He lives in Philadelphia.
(c) Randl Bye
Sawad Hussain (Mentor: Arabic)
Sawad Hussain is a translator from Arabic. She is a judge for the Palestine Books Awards. She has run translation workshops under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library and the National Centre for Writing. She was the 2022 translator in residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation. Her Twitter handle is @sawadhussain.
(c) Sawad Hussain
Elena Pala (Mentor: Italian)
Elena translates from Italian and French. Since taking part in the mentorship programme in 2019-2020, she has gone on to translate four novels and contributed to several anthologies of literature in translation such as Strangers Press’ SVIZRA, showcasing contemporary Swiss authors. Recent titles include Alba Donati’s Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop for W&N and Beatrice Salvioni’s The Cursed Friend (forthcoming) for HarperVia. Her first book-length translation, The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi, has been shortlisted for the TA’s first translation prize and the John Florio prize, and adapted for radio by John Retallack for BBC Radio 3.
(c) Stuart Gilbert
Clare Richards (Mentor: Korean)
Clare Richards is an editor, writer and translator from Korean. Her debut novel translation, Kang Hwagil’s gothic thriller, Another Person (the project she worked on with mentor Anton Hur as the 2020-21 mentee in Korean) was published by Pushkin Press this year. Clare has a particular interest in the intersection between disability and translation, and is passionate about making literary translation more accessible as a field. @clarehannahmary
(c) Clare Richards
Jamie Lee Searle (Mentor: Swiss German)
Jamie Lee Searle is a literary translator from German and Portuguese into English. Her publications include Urs Faes’ Twelve Nights, Anna Kim’s The Great Homecoming and Joachim B. Schmidt’s Kalmann. She is currently working on a translation of Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch, the recipient of the 2022 German and Swiss book prizes. Jamie is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and a co-founder of the Emerging Translators Network. She has held translation and writing residencies at Art Omi, New York, and the Austrian Literature Society, Vienna.
(c) Hannah Jeffery
Jeremy Tiang (Mentor: Languages of Singapore)
Jeremy Tiang has translated over thirty books from Chinese, including Yan Ge’s Strange Beasts of China (runner-up, Warwick Prize for Women in Translation), Liu Xinwu’s The Wedding Party (shortlisted for the National Translation Award) and Zou Jingzhi’s Ninth Building (longlisted for the International Booker Prize). He also writes and translates plays, His novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, and he is the co-editor with Dr Kavita Bhanot of Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation. Originally from Singapore, he now lives in New York City.
(c) Jeremy Tiang
