Following the retirement of founder and director Linda Gaboriau after the 2007 residency, The Banff Centre has appointed Calgary-based translator and author Susan Ouriou as director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC).
“The Banff Centre has been fortunate to work for five years with a director as accomplished and dedicated as Linda Gaboriau,” says Sarah Iley, vice-president, Programming at the Centre. “We’re very pleased that her plans for BILTC will be passed on to Susan Ouriou, a translator who has been involved with the program since the beginning and who shares her vision.”
Specializing in translations of works in French and Spanish into English, Susan Ouriou has been short-listed twice for the Governor General’s Award for Literary Translation. Her translations have included Michèle Marineau’s The Road to Chlifa, Guillaume Vigneault’s Necessary Betrayals, and The Thirteenth Summer by José Luis Olaizola. Faculty for The Banff Centre’s 2006 Emerging Aboriginal Writers residency, Ouriou has taught translation at the University of Calgary, and helped to create and edit a bi-annual national translation anthology, TransLit.
Founded in 2003 and the only program of its kind in North America, BILTC is an annual three-week residency for established translators. The translators are given the time and space for uninterrupted work on current publication projects, often with the writers whose work they are translating. The program focuses on translations of Canadian literature into a variety of international languages, and the translation of international works of fiction into French, Spanish, and English for readers in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Writers who have participated in the program have included Yann Martel, Ann-Marie Macdonald, Edward P. Jones, and Joseph Boyden.
