Media Release

For Immediate Release
May 14, 2004

Author Ann-Marie MacDonald Flies in for Banff translation residency and reading

Acclaimed Canadian novelist Ann-Marie MacDonald will join five other authors and 15 translators at The Banff Centre for a Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC) residency in June. She will be working with the Israeli translator of her most recent novel, The Way the Crow Flies, and will also give a free reading in the Centre’s Rolston Recital Hall at 7:30 p.m. on June 16.

The translators here for the June residency will be working on projects in nine languages, including Bulgarian, English, Dutch, French, Hebrew, Mayan, Spanish, Romanian, and Russian. They’ll arrive in Banff from seven countries, and they’ll work with writers including Frances Itani, winner of a Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award for Deafening, Gail Scott, author of Main Brides and My Paris, Robert Hough, author of The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, and Robert Finley, winner of the Cunard First Book Award in 2001 for The Accidental Indies.

Senior translators in residence include Sheila Fischman (pre-eminent translator of Quebec fiction and two-time winner of a Governor General's Award for translation), Quebec poet and translator Émile Martel, Mexican translator Raúl Ortiz, American translator Margaret Sayers Peden (who has translated prominent Latin American authors, including Isabel Allende, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz), and program director Linda Gaboriau whose translations of Québec theatre have garnered numerous awards, including a 1996 Governor General's Award.

Established in the summer of 2003, the BILTC is modeled on similar translation centres in Europe, but is unique in North America.

Authors and translators rarely get the opportunity to work in close proximity, exploring not only text but context. The three-week program affords literary translators a period of uninterrupted work on a current publication project within an international community of translators and writers. In 2003, participants produced a Bulgarian translation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and a Basque translation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, among other projects. Participation in BILTC residencies is open to international translators working on literature from the Americas, and to literary translators from Canada, the United States, and Mexico translating from any language.
 

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