Peter R. Bush (born 1946) is an English literary translator. He has translated works from Catalan, French, Spanish and Portuguese to English, including the work of Josep Pla, Joan Sales and Merce Rodoreda.
Peter R. Bush (born 1946) is an English literary translator. He has translated works from Catalan, French, Spanish and Portuguese to English, including the work of Josep Pla, Joan Sales and Merce Rodoreda.
Peter Bush was born in Spalding, Lincolnshire. [1] His father, from a large rural working-class family, was a print worker and trade unionist; his mother grew up in an urban working-class family in Sheffield. [2] He studied French and Spanish at Cambridge University before gaining a DPhil in Spanish history and fiction from Oxford University.
Though Bush translated various Marxist economic and political analyses between 1967 and 1972, since then he has only translated literary texts. He has spoken of the crucial importance in his life of translating Juan Goytisolo:
"I suppose my first Goytisolo translations brought something of a decisive change in my life. The translation of his work has been inseparable from the way my life has developed." [2]
Bush has been active not only as a literary translator, but also in developing literary translation as an academic discipline – by working in the academic world; serving in key literary translation organisations; serving on the editorial boards of literary translation publications; and organising international events and projects.
After teaching in London schools he joined Middlesex University where he was Associate Senior Lecturer in Spanish (1993–1995), Reader in Literary Translation (1995–1997) and Professor of Literary Translation (1997–1998). He then moved to the University of East Anglia, where he was Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) (1998–2003), and Professor of Literary Translation at the School of English and American Studies. [3] He has been a visiting professor at University of São Paulo (1996), Boston University (1996, 1999) and Beijing University (2001).
Bush has held key positions in important literary translation organisations: Literary Translation Committee (Chair); International Translators Federation (Vice-President, 1996–2003); American Literary Translators Association (board of directors, 1999–2002); Committee for Literary Translation in Higher Education (Convenor, 1993–1999); In Other Words (Executive Committee, Founder and editor, 1995–2003); The European Network of Literary Translation Centres (RECIT) (2000–2003).
Bush has also served on several editorial boards: Mediterraneans, a journal of literature, culture and politics (Paris), published by The Mediterranean Study Group (since 1993); Middlesex University Press (1996–2001); The Encyclopaedia of Literary Translation, Fitzroy Dearbourne (1997–2000); Pretexts, Pen & Ink, University of East Anglia (2002–2004); The Massachusetts Review (since 2014).
Juan Goytisolo Gay was a Spanish poet, essayist, and novelist. He lived in Marrakesh from 1997 until his death in 2017. He was considered Spain's greatest living writer at the beginning of the 21st century, yet he had lived abroad since the 1950s. On 24 November 2014 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world.
Juan Carlos Onetti Borges was a Uruguayan novelist and author of short stories.
Alonso Cueto Caballero is a Peruvian author, university professor and newspaper columnist.
The Scott Moncrieff Prize, established in 1965, and named after the translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff, is an annual £2,000 literary prize for French to English translation, awarded to one or more translators every year for a full-length work deemed by the Translators Association to have "literary merit". The Prizes is currently sponsored by the Institut Français du Royaume Uni. Only translations first published in the United Kingdom are considered for the accolade.
The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (1990–2015) was a British literary award. It was inaugurated by British newspaper The Independent to honour contemporary fiction in translation in the United Kingdom. The award was first launched in 1990 and ran for five years before falling into abeyance. It was revived in 2001 with the financial support of Arts Council England. Beginning in 2011 the administration of the prize was taken over by BookTrust, but retaining the "Independent" in the name. In 2015, the award was disbanded in a "reconfiguration" in which it was merged with the Man Booker International Prize.
Leonardo de la Caridad Padura Fuentes is a Cuban novelist and journalist. As of 2007, he is one of Cuba's best-known writers internationally. In his native Spanish, as well as in English and some other languages, he is often referred to by the shorter form of his name, Leonardo Padura. He has written screenplays, two books of short stories, and a series of detective novels translated into 10 languages. In 2012, Padura was awarded the National Prize for Literature, Cuba's national literary award and the most important award of its kind. In 2015, he was awarded the Premio Principe de Asturias de las Letras of Spain, one of the most important literary prizes in the Spanish-speaking world and usually considered as the Iberoamerican Nobel Prize.
Josep Pla i Casadevall was a Spanish journalist and a popular author. As a journalist he worked in France, Italy, Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, from where he wrote political and cultural chronicles in Catalan and Spanish.
Helen Lane was an American translator of Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian language literary works into English. She translated works by numerous important authors including Jorge Amado, Augusto Roa Bastos, Marguerite Duras, Juan Goytisolo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Curzio Malaparte, Juan Carlos Onetti, Octavio Paz, Nélida Piñon, and Luisa Valenzuela. She was a recipient of the National Book Award.
Rosa Regàs was a Spanish writer and novelist. She was a recipient of the Premio Planeta de Novela and the Premio Nadal.
Robert Lima is a Cuban-born American poet, literary critic, bibliographer, playwright, editor, biographer, and translator. He is a professor emeritus of Spanish and Comparative Literatures at Pennsylvania State University, as well as fellow emeritus of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies. Lima is an academician of the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española and a corresponding member of the Real Academia Española. Honored as a distinguished alumnus by Villanova University, he was also inducted into the Enxebre Orden da Vieira in Spain and dubbed Knight Commander in the Order of Queen Isabel of Spain by King Juan Carlos I. His 40-year career as a university professor and writer was heralded in A Confluence of Words. Studies in Honor of Robert Lima, published by Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs in 2011. In 2017, he was received into the Imperial Hispanic Order of Charles V, at the Alcazar Palace in Segovia, Spain as Knight Commander Gran Placa, at the hands of the Prince of Borbon.
The Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas or National Prize for Spanish Literature is one of several National Prizes awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. First awarded in 1984, it recognises an author's literary career. The prize is 40,000 euros.
Carmen Balcells Segala was a literary agent of Spanish-language authors from Spain and Latin America, including six Nobel Prize–winning authors. She led her agency from 1956 to 2000, during which time she was one of the driving forces behind the 1960s boom of Latin American literature.
Nick Caistor is a British translator and journalist, best known for his translations of Spanish, French, and Portuguese literature. He is a past winner of the Valle-Inclán Prize for translation. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, the BBC World Service, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Guardian. He lives in Norwich, and is married to fellow translator Amanda Hopkinson.
The Premio Valle-Inclán is a literary translation prize. It is awarded by the Society of Authors (London) for the best English translation of a work of Spanish literature. It is named after Ramón del Valle-Inclán. The prize money is GBP £3,000 and a runner-up is awarded £1,.000.
Josep Maria Castellet Díaz de Cossío, also known as José María Castellet, was a Spanish Catalan writer, poet, literacy critic, publisher and editor.
Uncertain Glory is a novel by the Catalan writer and publisher Joan Sales i Vallès. The backdrop to the novel is the Spanish Civil War, in which Sales fought on the Republican side. The novel portrays the war in all its brutal complexity and offers no obvious partisan message. As Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo points out in his foreword, Sales "does not root his thinking in certainties but rather in lives exposed to the world’s absurdity, its procession of blood, death and injustice".
Ros Schwartz is an English literary translator, who translates Francophone literature into English. In 2009 she was awarded the Chevalier d’Honneur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her services to French literature.
Teresa Solana i Mir is a contemporary Spanish writer of crime fiction in Catalan. She studied philosophy and the Classics at Universitat de Barcelona. Her work has been translated to English, French, German, Esperanto, Italian and Spanish.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a British translator of Polish literature based in London. She is best known as the long-time translator of Olga Tokarczuk's works in English, including Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019. The former co-chair of the Translators Association in the United Kingdom from 2015 to 2017, she is also a mentor for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme in the National Centre for Writing and has mentored several early-career translators from Polish into English.
Vera Reznik is a Russian writer, translator, literary scholar.
