Translating Sebastian Barry

Each year, to celebrate European Day of Languages (26th September) and International Translation Day (30th September), Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation works with EUNIC Ireland (the EU National Institutes for Culture) to bring together an outstanding Irish writer with a group of their European translators, to discuss how Irish literature is made available to people living in different cultural contexts.

This year, our special guests are award-winning writer Sebastian Barry and his translators into French, German, and Polish, Laetitia Devaux, Hans-Christian Oeser and Aga Zano.

This event will be in hybrid format, so you can choose to attend in-person or online.

It is organised in partnership with EUNIC Ireland, and kindly supported by the Goethe-Institut, The Embassy of France in Ireland, Alliance Française Dublin and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Dublin.

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The 2018-21 Laureate for Irish Fiction, his novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize. He had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008). He has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in County Wicklow. His most recent book, Old God's Time, has been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.

French Translator, Laetitia Devaux, studied French and English literature at Paris Cité University and Trinity College Dublin. Since then she has developed a passion for Irish life, literature and pubs.She has been translating Sebastian Barry’s novels since Days Without End (2016). She is also the French translator for Eimear McBride, Sally Rooney, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, and Vivian Gornick, among other writers.

German translator, Hans-Christian Oeser, who was born in Wiesbaden in 1950, is a freelance literary translator and editor of anthologies and foreign language texts in Dublin and Berlin. Among the many Irish authors he has translated are Brendan Behan, Maeve Brennan, Anne Enright, Claire Keegan, Bernard MacLaverty, Eugene McCabe, John McGahern, William Trevor, and Oscar Wilde. In 2020, he received the Straelen Translation Prize of the Kunststiftung NRW for Days Without End by Sebastian Barry and for his lifetime achievement in translation.

Aga Zano is a Polish translator and interpreter, and currently Vice-President of the Polish Literary Translators' Association. She studied at the University of Warsaw and Queen’s University Belfast and received numerous academic scholarships, including the Michael Pallin Award at QUB and the College of Humanities and Social Science Research Scholarship at the University of Edinburgh.

She has translated over 60 books by authors such as Sebastian Barry, Bernardine Evaristo, Lucy Caldwell, Colum McCann, Sylvia Plath, John Maxwell Coetzee, Joshua Cohen, Charles Yu, Megan Nolan, and Lydia Millet.

In 2023, she was nominated for the Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński Translation Work Award for her translation of Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo.

This event is kindly hosted by:

While you wait for the event, you might find it interesting to listen to a previous discussion, when Colm Tóibín was in conversation with his French, Greek and Polish translators, Anna Gibson, Athina Dimitriadou and Jerzy Kozłowski.