Award-winning translator Daniel Hahn in conversation with Astrid Huisman, the Literature Ireland University of Galway Translator in Residence 2025.
Wednesday 23 April I 4:30-6:00 PM I Seminar Room THB-G010 Hardiman Research Building (HRB) I University of Galway
Daniel Hahn, a writer, editor and translator, is one of the most well-known translators in the English-speaking world. His award-winning translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) include a wide range of fiction from Europe, Africa and the Americas; non-fiction on subjects including neuroscience, lighthouses and death; as well as children’s books and plays. He has translated picture books for children and is the editor of the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (2nd edition). Hahn is the recipient of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature and an OBE for his services to literature. He is a former chair of the Translators Association and the Society of Authors and helped to establish a new prize for literary translation (the TA First Translation Prize) by donating half of his winnings from the International Dublin Literary Award.
Hahn is particularly well-known for his translations of the work of the Angolan novelist José Eduardo Agualusa, including the novels Creole (2002), The Book of Chameleons (2006), My Father’s Wives (2008), Rainy Season (2009), and A General Theory of Oblivion (2015). In 2022 he published Catching Fire, a translation diary about the process of translation of Diamela Eltit’s Never Did the Fire. He has also translated Pelé’s autobiography and is currently translating a Guatemalan novel, co-editing (with Padma Viswanathan) a collection of Brazilian short stories, and writing a book about Shakespeare.