On Bonds and Boundaries: Making the Best of Author-Translator Relationships

Soje, Marilyn Booth and Annie Rutherford, chaired by Rosalind Harvey, explore the conditions and boundaries needed for a thriving working relationship between authors and translators.

The relationship between translator and author can range from fruitful to fraught. This panel with Soje, Marilyn Booth, and Annie Rutherford explores the conditions — and helpful boundaries — that can promote a thriving working relationship, and how authors can support translators in producing a compelling pitch for their book. 

The discussion is chaired by literary translator Rosalind Harvey.

Meet the Panel

Soje is a writer and the translator of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, Lee Soho’s Catcalling, Choi Jin-young’s Hunger and Everything Happened at Once, and Bae Myeong-eun’s The Spiritkeeper’s Apothecary.

Marilyn Booth is Professor Emerita of Arabic Studies at the University of Oxford and an award-winning translator of Arabic fiction. Her research focuses on Arab women’s writing, gender and translation. Her translation of Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.

Annie Rutherford is a writer, translator and artistic director of Highlight Arts. She champions poetry and translated literature, translates from German, French, Russian and Belarusian, and has published translations of poets including Nora Gomringer and Volha Hapeyeva, as well as Isabel Bogdan’s novel The Peacock. She has also mentored emerging translators through the National Centre for Writing.

Rosalind Harvey is a translator of contemporary Spanish-language fiction, including Luis López Carrasco’s The White Desert (Granta), and Marta Pérez-Carbonell’s I Made You Up Inside My Head (Sceptre). She is based in Coventry and is currently writing a memoir about translation, therapy, and relationships. 

 Part of the BCLT Korean-English advanced translation workshop, in partnership with National Centre for Writing and LTI Korea.