21. Lost in Translation
Publishing Professionals Event
Session Description
Translators connect new readers with important stories from other languages, but the process of translation can raise complex questions for authors from marginalized communities. As conversations about diversifying publishing continue to evolve, the issues affecting Canadian translation demand further attention as well. Who are the diverse writers currently being published in other languages, and who among them is being translated? Beyond that, with more diversity among authors seeing publication, what kind of support is needed to expand opportunities for translators from underrepresented communities?
How to Register
Events scheduled for May 1-15 are available via an all-access festival pass. The festival pass costs $39 and gives you access to a virtual festival platform, which includes an auditorium hosting forty virtual events, an exhibit hall with a live chat feature for communicating with vendors, and a lounge for engaging in discussions before and after events with other festival-goers.
Passholders will have be able to compete in the space for incredible prizes and will have access to the platform and all of the recorded festival events, as well as bonus content, until May 30, 2021. If the cost of the pass is prohibitive, please fill out the Patron Pass form, and a pass will be made available.
Featured Speaker(s)
Yara El-Ghadban
Palestinian Quebecker Yara El-Ghadban is an anthropologist by training but has been writing since she was thirteen. She is the author of three novels, of which I Am Ariel Sharon is the first to be translated into English. She won the Canada Council of the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award in 2017, and in 2019 she was awarded the Blue Metropolis Literary Diversity Prize. She lives and writes in Montreal.
Bilal Hashmi
Bilal Hashmi is Executive Director and Publisher of Quattro Books. He teaches Urdu at the University of Toronto, where he obtained his BA and MA in English before pursuing advanced studies in comparative literature at New York University. He is the President of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada and also serves as translators’ representative on the Public Lending Rights Commission of Canada. Since 2018, he has been involved with the bilingual literary translation magazine ellipse, as one of its editors. His annotated English translation of ‘Aziz Ahmad’s modernist Urdu novel Flight (Gurez; 1945) is forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Oonya Kempadoo
Oonya Kempadoo resides in Canada and is a UK, Guyanese, Grenadian citizen. She is the author of three novels, two of which were nominated for the Dublin Impac Prize. Her latest novel is All Decent Animals. Her work, critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, has been long-listed for the Orange Prize, translated into six languages and on Oprah Winfrey’s Summer Reads. Winner of a Casa De Las Americas prize, she was named a “Great Talent for the 21st Century” by Orange Prize judges. Kempadoo is a Fulbright Scholar alumni, consultant/researcher with an interest in cross-disciplinary dialogue and is co-founder of the Grenada Community Library.
Dimitri Nasrallah
Editor, translator, and essayist Dimitri Nasrallah is the author of three novels, most recently 2018’s The Bleeds. He was born in Lebanon two years into the country’s 15-year civil war, and lived in Kuwait, Greece, and Dubai before moving to Canada in 1988. His first novel, 2005’s Blackbodying, won the Quebec’s McAuslan First Book Prize and was a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. His second novel, 2011’s Niko, won the QWF Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and was nominated for CBC’s Canada Reads and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He is the fiction editor at Véhicule Press.
