Literary translation is exquisitely poised between science and art: It requires all the accuracy of a science to remain faithful to the letter of the original and all the creativity of an art to remain faithful to its spirit. One of the areas in which the creativity comes to the fore is in identifying and transliterating voices – from the narrative voice(s) driving a whole book, via the slippery device of free indirect speech to actual dialogue. This lecture will describe the process of trying to nail voices in translation across a variety of fictional genres, and will explain why it’s like character acting on the page!

Adriana Hunter spent four years at a French school as a child, and took a 1st (summa cum laude) in French & Drama at the University of London. She worked as a film publicist and freelance writer before “discovering” the first book she was to translate. She has now translated over 90 books, mostly works of literary fiction. She won the 2011 Scott-Moncrieff Prize and the 2013 French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize, and was shortlisted twice for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (now the Man Booker International).  She lives in Kent, England.