Shaun Whiteside (born 1959) is a Northern Irish translator of French, Dutch, German, and Italian literature. He has translated many novels, including Manituana and Altai by Wu Ming, The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink, Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq, and Magdalene the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger, which won him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation in 1997. [1] [2] [3] Since May 2021, he has served as the president of the European Council of Literary Translators' Associations. [4]
Whiteside was born in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland in 1959. [5] He graduated with a First in Modern Languages at King's College, Cambridge. After he finished his studies, he worked as a business journalist and television producer before translating full-time. As he said in a brief interview, "Did I always want to be a translator? I certainly wanted to do something that involved travel and languages, but even when my work in television took me to far-off places, I kept coming back to translation, first for fun, and eventually as a way of earning a living." [2] Whiteside is the former Chair of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors. [6] He currently lives in London with his wife and son, where he sits on the PEN Writers in Translation committee, the editorial board of New Books in German, and the Advisory Panel of the British Centre for Literary Translation, where he regularly teaches at the summer school. [7] He has stated that he would like to "have a go at Uwe Tellkamp's Der Turm (The Tower), a massive great project but a worthwhile one." [2]
The Translators Association (TA) represents literary translators in the United Kingdom. It is part of the Society of Authors (SoA) and is affiliated with the International Federation of Translators (FIT).
Frank Wynne is an Irish literary translator and writer.
Wu Ming, Chinese for "anonymous", is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna. Four of the group earlier wrote the novel Q. Unlike the open name "Luther Blissett", "Wu Ming" stands for a defined group of writers active in literature and popular culture. The band authored several novels, some of which have been translated in many countries.
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English".
Anthea Bell was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include The Castle by Franz Kafka, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French Asterix comics with co-translator Derek Hockridge.
Lilian Faschinger is an Austrian novelist, short story writer, poet, and literary translator.
Manituana is a novel by Wu Ming first published in Italian in 2007.
Breon Mitchell is an American scholar, literary translator and bibliographer. He was Professor of Comparative Literature and Germanic Studies, and Director of the Lilly Library, at Indiana University. He was a founding member of the American Literary Translators Association and served as President in its early years. He has translated numerous major works from the German by such authors as Franz Kafka, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Siegfried Lenz, and Uwe Timm (Morenga). Mitchell translated and then revised What Must Be Said by Grass in April 2012. Among his awards are the ATA’s Ungar Prize, the ALTA Translation Prize, the Kurt and Helen Wolff Prize, the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, the British Society of Authors’ Schlegel-Tieck Prize, and the Banff Centre’s Linda Gaboriau Prize.
Jamie Bulloch is a British historian and translator of German literature, with over fifty published titles to his name, and twice winner of the Schlegel-Tieck prize.
Leila Vennewitz was a Canadian-English translator of German literature. She was born Leila Croot in Hampshire, England and grew up in Portsmouth. Her brother was the surgeon Sir John Croot.
The Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation is a literary translation award given by the Society of Authors in London. Translations from the German original into English are considered for the prize. The value of the prize is £3,000, while the runner-up now receives £1,000. The prize is named for August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, who translated Shakespeare to German in the 19th century.
John Maxwell Brownjohn was a British literary translator.
Philip Boehm is an American playwright, theater director and literary translator. Born in Texas, he was educated at Wesleyan University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the State Academy of Theater in Warsaw, Poland.
Krishna Winston is an American academic and translator of German literature. She is the daughter of translators Richard and Clara Winston. She obtained her BA at Smith College, followed by an MPhil and a doctorate from Yale University. She is currently the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature at Wesleyan University.
Vincent Kling is an American scholar and translator of German literature. He studied at La Salle University, the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. His PhD thesis was based on the works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He also spent some time at Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany, and later taught at the University of Vienna under a Fulbright scholarship.
Submission is a novel by French writer Michel Houellebecq. The French edition of the book was published on 7 January 2015 by Flammarion, with German (Unterwerfung) and Italian (Sottomissione) translations also published in January. The book instantly became a bestseller in France, Germany and Italy. The English edition of the book, translated by Lorin Stein, was published on 10 September 2015.
Sally-Ann Spencer is a British translator, specialising in German literature. She studied languages at Cambridge University before going to work in the publishing industry. In 2005, she moved to New Zealand, at the same time choosing literary translation as her full-time profession. She completed a PhD on German literature at the Victoria University of Wellington.
Susan Bernofsky is an American translator of German-language literature and author. She is best known for bringing the Swiss writer Robert Walser to the attention of the English-speaking world, translating many of his books and writing his biography. She has also translated several books by Jenny Erpenbeck and Yoko Tawada. Her prizes for translation include the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, the 2012 Calw Hermann Hesse Prize, the 2015 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the 2015 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. She was also selected for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. In 2017 she won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her translation of Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada. In 2018 she was awarded the MLA's Lois Roth Award for her translation of Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck. In 2024, Bernofsky was reported to be working on a translation of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.
Serotonin is a novel by French writer Michel Houellebecq, published in January 2019.
Michel Houellebecq is a French writer and occasional actor, film director and singer.