Meet the World: Who Represents the Translator?

Anton Hur is the author of Toward Eternity and the translator of Kim Choyeop’s If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Lee Seong-bok’s That Summer’s End, Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets, and others. He was double-longlisted and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, a finalist for the National Book Award, and nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He resides in Seoul.

Sawad Hussain is an Arabic translator and litterateur with a particular passion for bringing narratives from Africa to a wider audience. Her work has been recognised by English PEN, the Anglo-Omani Society and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, among others. She has been a judge for, inter alia, the Palestine Book Awards and the 2023 National Translation Award, and has run translation workshops under the auspices of organisations as varied as Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library and the National Centre for Writing. Her most recent translations include Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table (HarperVia) and Asad’s Secret (Levine Querido). A former co-chair of the Translators Association in the UK, Sawad has been the Translator in Residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation (2022), Wasafiri (2024-25) and Princeton University (2025). In a past life, she lectured at the IAIS at the University of Exeter, and taught Arabic (KS3 & KS4) in Johannesburg and Dubai. She lives in Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and her oeuvre can be further explored at www.sawadhussain.com.

Ecre Karadag is a literary translator working from Japanese. Her translations include Asako Yuzuki’s Mari the Unwonderful Witch (Penguin Random House Children’s UK), with further works forthcoming from Pushkin Press. Ecre holds an MA in Translation from SOAS, University of London, and an MA in Japanese Studies from Sophia University, Tokyo. While living in Tokyo, she was Head of Editorial and Rights at The COMM, a multilingual Japanese street-fashion magazine. She was mentored by Polly Barton through the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorship programme and subsequently selected as an NCW Virtual Translator in Residence.