Seminars on translation. "Encounters: Writers and Translators in Conversation"

© New Directions Publishers.

What's in a Name (New Directions, 2019). 

During this seminar we will present the latest book of poems by Ana Luisa Amaral, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Both author and translator will appear in conversation with Isabel Pires de Lima, a specialist in Portuguese literature. 

Ana Luisa Amaral is a Portuguese writer, literary critic, and translator. She has received many national and international literary prizes, including the Great Poetry Prize of the Portuguese Writer's Association in 2008. She is an established translator of Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, John Updike, to name a few. She has pioneered feminist theories and the publication of the first dictionary of feminist concepts in 2005 marked an important turning point in Portuguese studies. Subsequently she prepared an annotated edition of New Portuguese Letters allowing a new generation to engage with one of the most important texts in 20th-century Portuguese literature. 

Margaret Jull Costa is a translator of Portuguese- and Spanish-language fiction and poetry. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the international IMPAC Dublin Literacy Award for her translation of Marías’s A Heart So White. In 2011, she won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for the third time with her translation of The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago. More recently, in 2012, she was winner and runner-up of the Calouste Gulbenkian Prize for The Word Tree by Teolinda Gersão and for António Lobo Antunes's The Land at the End of the World. In 2018, Margaret Jull Costa was awarded the Ordem do Infante Dom Henrique, acknowledging her important role in making Spanish and Portuguese fiction more widely known in Britain. 

Isabel Pires de Lima is Emeritus Professor at the University of Porto and Researcher at the Institute for Comparative Literature Margarida Losa. She is a specialist in Modern and Contemporary Portuguese Literature and "Queirosian" studies with many publications. She has served as a member of the Assembly of the Republic of Portugal and as Minister for Culture (2005-2008).

Find out more about What's in a Name on the New Directions Publishing website.