Speakers

• George Szirtes
  Born in Hungary in 1948, his first book of poems, The Slant Door (1979) won the Faber Prize. He has published many since then, Reel (2004) winning the T S Eliot Prize, for which he has been twice shortlisted since. His books have appeared in multiple languages and won prizes in Hungary, Romania and China. His memoir of his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen (2019) was awarded the James Tait Black prize for Biography in 2020. He began translating on his return to Hungary in 1984, first chiefly poetry, then Imre Madách’s The Tragedy of Man, followed by numerous books of poetry and some dozen novels, including works by Kosztolányi, Krúdy, Márai, Szabó and László Krasznahorkai, for which last he was awarded the translator’s prize at the International Booker in 2015. He has also edited and co-edited various anthologies of Hungarian writing.
• Will Forrester (English PEN)
  Will Forrester is Translation and International Manager at English PEN, where he runs PEN Translates (the UK’s largest grant for literature in translation), edits PEN Transmissions (an online magazine of international literature), and programmes International Translation Day. Previously, he worked for Commonwealth Writers, the cultural agency for the Commonwealth, and in the visual arts in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Elsewhere, he is Project Manager for Untold, a programme working with writers in conflict and post-conflict areas, and is Non-fiction Editor at Review 31. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the London Magazine, and elsewhere.

• Adam Freudenheim (Pushkin Press)
  Adam has worked in publishing since 1998 and was Publisher of Penguin Classics, Modern Classics and Reference from 2004 to 2012. Adam joined Pushkin in May 2012, where he has launched the Pushkin Children’s Books, Pushkin Vertigo and ONE imprints, and he is particularly proud to have published the first translation of The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt and Jakob Wegelius’s dazzlingly original The Murderer’s Ape; as well as to have introduced the acclaimed American short story writer Edith Pearlman to British readers (with Binocular Vision) and Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (her most recent novel is Liar). Born in Baltimore, Adam lived near Düsseldorf and in Berlin for nearly three years and came to the UK in 1997. Adam brings his passion for international literature and exquisitely designed books to Pushkin.
• Katharina Bielenberg (Maclehose Press)
  Katharina Bielenberg has worked in bookselling and various areas of publishing for almost 30 years. At MacLehose Press she has worked as an editor on a broad range of texts, including crime novels (Pierre Lemaitre, Stieg Larsson, Oliver Bottini), non-fiction (Lars Mytting, Erika Fatland, Cees Nooteboom) and literary fiction (Daša Drndiƈ, Timur Vermes, Daniela Krien). She also co-translated Love Virtually and Every Seventh Wave by Daniel Glattauer together with her husband, Jamie Bulloch. MacLehose Press is an imprint of Quercus (Hachette), publishing literature from 24 languages.
• Christophe Fricker (University of Bristol)
  Christophe Fricker has been working in publishing for more or less his entire life. He started out as a co-editor of Zeichen & Wunder, a Frankfurt-based literary quarterly, when he was a teenager. He then joined the editorial board of Castrum Peregrini, an Amsterdam-based cultural journal, and engaged in a seven-year struggle for its modernisation. He worked as associate editor of the German Quarterly as part of his post-doc, and has been an adviser to Krachkultur, one of Germany’s leading literary journals, since 2013. He has published his own poetry, his translations of contemporary American poetry into German and, increasingly, of German poetry into English, in dozens of journals, anthologies and books. Christophe teaches German and Translation at the University of Bristol.
• Lilidh Kendrick (Bloomsbury Publishing)
  Lilidh Kendrick is an Assistant Editor at Bloomsbury Publishing, where she has worked for the last three years across a range of non-fiction and fiction, including on the literary crime and thriller imprint Raven Books. After graduating with a degree in Modern Languages from the University of Edinburgh, Lilidh studied for a Masters in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, with a focus on contemporary Spanish literature, and went on to complete a Masters in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow. Before beginning her career in publishing, Lilidh lived in Galicia, on the northern coast of Spain, where she combined teaching with translation. Lilidh enjoys working at the intersection where translation meets publishing and is passionate about discovering exciting books from around the world to introduce to UK readers.
• Barbara Schwepcke (Haus Publishing)
  Dr Barbara Haus Schwepcke is the founder of Haus Publishing and chair of the board of trustees of Gingko. After receiving her doctorate from the London School of Economics she worked as publisher of Prospect Magazine and editor at the Harvill Press. In 2003 she founded Haus Publishing, following the advice of WG Sebald to bring the Rowohlt monograph series to an English-speaking audience. Following the death of her beloved Mark Linz, who believed publishing translations could build bridges between people often divided by ignorance of "the Other", she fulfilled his last great wish: to publish a library of thought, called Gingko, which should bring East and West closer together. Named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous poem, the charity’s first five years culminated in A New Divan, a collection of 24 original poems published in a multilingual edition in 2019, the 200th anniversary of the first publication of the West-Eastern Divan.
• Sarah Cleave (Comma Press)
  Sarah Cleave is Publishing Manager at Comma Press, an independent publisher specialising in the short story and fiction in translation. She has worked on translation projects from over 25 languages, and is the editor of Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations and Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe. Sarah is also the coordinator of the Northern Fiction Alliance and Associate Lecturer in Publishing at Manchester Metropolitan University.