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Date: 16 December 2023
Location: online (Zoom)
We are delighted to offer six up-and-coming literary translators working between Ukrainian and English an opportunity to hone their craft on and beyond the page with this online workshop.
Three expert translators will provide their feedback on a sample translation; a literary agent and a publishing professional will share their insights into how Ukrainian literature gets published in English; all six participants’ sample translations will be published in London Ukrainian Review. The participants will receive a stipend of £120 each.
Those who wish to participate need to submit an application, including a short sample translation of up to 2,000 words of prose or 20 lines of poetry or drama along with the source text and their CV. The deadline to apply is 23:59 on 6 December 2023. Responses will be sent out on 8 December; please note that we may not be able to provide feedback to unsuccessful applicants.
Successful applicants will be required to confirm their participation by 12 December and commit to attending the workshop. The live online Zoom session will take place in the morning on 16 December 2023; it will last 2,5 hours.
Participants will be selected on the primary basis of their submitted sample translation, their motivation to participate, the rationale behind their choice of the source text, and their submitted sample translation’s availability for publication. Their experience and qualifications will be considered as secondary criteria.
This workshop is funded by the Embassy of Ukraine to the United Kingdom.
Nina Murray was born and raised in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv. She holds advanced degrees in linguistics and creative writing. She is the author of the poetry collection Alcestis in the Underworld(Circling Rivers Press, 2019) as well as chapbooks Minimize Considered (Finishing Line Press, 2018), Minor Heresies (Heartland Review Press, 2020), and Damascus Electric (Pen & Anvil Press, 2020). Her translations from Ukrainian include Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets, and Oksana Lutsyshyna’s Ivan and Phoebe (forthcoming from Deep Vellum). Nina is the winner of the Ukrainian Institute London’s Ukrainian Literature in Translation Prize 2021. You can read her winning translation of Lesia Ukrainka’s Cassandra here.
Uilleam Blacker is a lecturer in comparative East European culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His areas of research interest are the literatures and cultures of Ukraine and Poland and cultural memory in eastern Europe. His monograph Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East-Central Europe was published by Routledge in 2019. He is co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012) and co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). He has published widely on Ukrainian, Polish and Russian literature and culture. He has translated the work of several contemporary Ukrainian writers, including, most recently, Oleg Sentsov’s short story collection Life Went On Anyway (Deep Vellum, 2019). He is a member of the jury for the International Booker Prize 2023.
Daisy Gibbons is a London-based translator of Ukrainian and Russian into English, with an extensive portfolio of published works. She won first place in the UIL’s Ukrainian Literature in Translation Prize in 2022 and was runner-up in 2021.
Daisy has previously translated Tamara Duda’s award-winning novel Daughter, and co-translated Vakhtang Kipiani’s WWII, Uncontrived and Unredacted: Testimonies from Ukraine. She has also translated and edited translations of various non-fiction books for Ukraine-based Osnovy Publishing.
Emma Shercliff is a literary agent and the founder of Laxfield Literary Associates: her clients include Oleksandr Mykhed, Artem Chapeye, Mstyslav Chernov and the estate of
Victoria Amelina. Emma has worked for publishing companies in Paris, Melbourne, Abuja and London, and for the British Council in Nigeria and Iran. In 2019, she undertook an in-depth review of the publishing sector in Ukraine for the British Council. Emma sits on
Advisory Boards for the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, University of Reading and the MA Publishing, University of Exeter. She has written for industry publications including The Bookseller, Publishing Perspectives, Wasafiri and LOGOS. Emma is a doctoral
candidate at the UCL Institute of Education; her PhD research focuses on the role and contribution of women within the African publishing industry.
Clare Bullock is Senior Commissioning Editor at Icon Books, an independent publisher of excellent non-fiction. Clare began her career at Jonathan Cape, Penguin Random House,
working on everything from graphic novels in translation to Booker-Prize shortlisted debuts, before moving to Ebury Press, Penguin Random House. Since joining Icon in 2021, she has published books that focus on the stories we tend not to hear, such as What’s Cooking in the Kremlin by Witold Szabłowski (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones), Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H, XI: A Study in Power by Kerry Brown and UPROAR!: Scandal, Satire and Printmakers in Georgian London by Alice Loxton.
