Translation Odysseys: Life as a Literary Translator
Tuesday 4 November, 7 – 8pm (GMT), ONLINE, FREE
Join Yarri Kamara, Elena Pala, and Shaun Whiteside as they share their personal journeys working between Italian and English.
What is it like to be a literary translator in 2025? Discover what drew them to literary translation, what keeps them in the field despite today’s challenges, and their thoughts on existing support, and what more they would like to see in the future.
Their conversation will be chaired by Barbara Ofosu-Somuah.
Part of the BCLT Italian-English advanced translation workshop, in partnership with National Centre for Writing and the Italian Cultural Institute
To find out more and register click HERE
Yarri Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-Ugandan translator and writer based in Milan, Italy. Her translation work is centred on African literature and she was a finalist for the US National Translation Award in Prose in 2023 for her translation of Burkinabe novelist Monique Ilboudo’s So Distant from my Life. She co-edited the anthology Sahara: A thousand paths into the future (Sternberg Press, 2023).
Born in Accra, Ghana in 1991, Barbara Ofosu-Somuah holds a B.A. in Social Psychology with a minor in Italian from Middlebury College, an MA in Romance Studies from Duke University, and is currently a PhD candidate in Romance Studies on the Italian track also at Duke University. She is a translator from Italian into English. She has been a Judge for the ALTA Italian Prose in Translation Award and the PEN America Translation Prize. Her writing and translations are in Words Without Borders, Public Books, Lampblack Magazine, Palimpsest Magazine, the edited collection Violent Phenomena (Tilted Axis Press), and elsewhere.
Elena Pala translates from Italian and French. Since taking part in the BCLT summer school and NCW’s Emerging Translators Mentorship programme in 2019-20, she has gone on to translate five novels. Her first book-length translation, The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi, has been shortlisted for the TA’s First Translation Prize and the John Florio Prize.
Shaun Whiteside is a translator of fiction and non-fiction from Italian, French, German, and Dutch. His translations from Italian include works by Giorgio Pressburger, Melissa Panarello, Tiziano Scarpa, Paolo Giordano, Nicola Pugliese and Luther Blissett/Wu Ming. His most recent Italian translation, The Earth is Falling by Carmen Pellegrino, was published last year by Prototype.