This year’s Sebald Lecture on literary translation, presented by the British Centre for Literary Translation in association with the National Centre for Writing and the British Library, is now online for you to enjoy!

The 2023 lecture was delivered by Alberto Manguel, writer, translator and editor and acclaimed author of The Library at Night and A History of Reading. It consists of a series of notes or thoughts on the art of translation, on translation as a form of reading, of writing, of thinking. The translator is the secret sharer in the creation of a text, providing the original with what Borges called ‘a draft in another language.’ Translation allows a text to come of age, generation after generation, and to enter a culture different from that of the original creator.

Alberto Manguel is an Argentinian-born Canadian writer, translator and editor who is the acclaimed author of The Library at Night and A History of Reading. He has written over twenty works of criticism and edited more than thirty literary anthologies; he is the author of six novels, including News from a Foreign Country Came, which won the McKitterick Prize. He has translated works by Amin Maalouf, Anna Seghers, Philippe Sollers and Marguerite Yourcenar into English, Katherine Mansfield and Arnold Wesker into Spanish. A Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) and Officer of the Order of Canada, he has also been awarded the Formentor Prize, the Gutenberg Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. From 2016–2018 he was Director of the National Library in his native Argentina, following in the footsteps of Borges, and he is now Director of the Espaço Atlântida, the Centre for the Study of the History of Reading in Lisbon.