Banff International Literary Translation Centre hosts Book of Negroes author Lawrence Hill

Banff, Alberta, June 6, 2010 -- Lawrence Hill, author of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize-winning novel The Book of Negroes, returns to The Banff Centre as a guest of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC) on June 16. He’ll read from the novel, published in 2007 in Canada, and as Someone Knows My Name in the United States. An account of one 18th century African woman’s migrations through slavery, war, and the upheavals of history, the novel is one of the biggest recent bestsellers in Canadian literature.   

Author of Any Known Blood and Some Great Thing, Hill’s work touches on issues of identity and belonging, greatly influenced by his parents’ work in human rights in Canada. He’s in Banff to work with Quebecois translator Carole Noël, one of the 15 participants in the BILTC program, who is translating The Book of Negroes into French. Translators in Banff for the three-week program will be translating from and into languages including French, Persian, Spanish, Dutch, Papiamentu, Russian, and German.  

BILTC is an annual three-week residency that gives translators from Canada, Mexico, and the United States uninterrupted time and space to work on current publications, and for translators from around the world to work on translations of books by authors from the Americas. Participants often work directly with the writers whose work they are translating. Since its establishment in 2003, BILTC has hosted translators from 26 countries translating work involving 36 languages. Invited writers have included Ann-Marie MacDonald, Man Booker prize-winner Yann Martel, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward P. Jones.

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