Experts Panel Choice - Spring 2010

Peter Bush now works in Barcelona as a freelance literary translator after a five-year stint as Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation and Professor of Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia. He was awarded the 2009 Calouste Gulbenkian Prize for his translation of Equator by Miguel Sousa Tavares. He edited (with Susan Bassnett) The Translator as Writer and put together the anthology of Cuban stories The Voice of the Turtle. His most recent publication is Fernando de Rojas’s novel Celestina and his translation of Najat El Hachmi’s The Last Patriarch will be published in May. Current projects from Catalan include Quim Monzó’s Guadalajara, Teresa Solana’s Shortcut to Paradise and Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook and from Spanish, Lorca’s Sketches of Spain, Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas and Juan Goytisolo’s Níjar Country.

Emeritus Professor of Latin American Literature at University College London. Main publications include Octavio Paz: A Study of his Poetics (1979), Octavio Paz (1989), An A-Z of Modern Latin American Literature in English Translation (1989), Traveller's Literary Companion to South and Central America (1993), Buenos Aires, a Cultural and Literary Companion (1999), Jorge Luis Borges (2006), A Companion to Pablo Neruda (2008) and The Andes (2009). He has edited and translated Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1995, for Penguin Classics), Octavio Paz’s Itinerary (1999) and Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Journey to Mauritius (2002). He continues to research on surrealism and travel writing.

Nick Caistor is a British translator from Spanish and Portuguese. After living for several years in Latin America, on his return to Britain he began to translate fiction by Latin American and Spanish authors. He has now translated some 40 works of fiction, and in 2006 and 2008 was awarded the Valle Inclan prize for translation from Spanish. He has been part of the Spanish New Books project since it started.

Pete Ayrton was born in London in 1943. He studied at Oxford and London. He lectured philosophy at London University in the 1970s and subsequently started to work in publishing as a translator. He set up Serpent's Tail in 1986 with a commitment to publish fiction in translation and new writers. In 1989, Serpent's Tail won the Sunday Times Small Publisher of the Year Award. Serpent's Tail has published three Nobel Literature Prize winners: Kenzaburo Oe in 1994, Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 and Herta Müller in 2009. In 2005, We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver won the Orange Prize for Fiction and has gone on to sell almost one million copies. In 2007, Serpent's Tail was bought by Profile Books Ltd and became an imprint of that company. Spanish authors that Serpent's Tail has published include Juan Goytisolo, Manual Vazquez Montalban, Rafael Reig and Rafael Chirbes.

Following a career in publishing (Rights Director at Andre Deutsch, Heinemann and Macmillan) Sarah Lutyens opened the literary agency Lutyens & Rubinstein with Felicity Rubinstein in 1993. She represents a broad range of authors from crime writers Mark Billingham and John Harvey to novelists Michelle de Kretser and Rebecca Hunt. She also works in the UK with the Australian publisher Text Publishing (Lloyd Jones, Peter Temple) and American agents Emma Sweeney and Kimberly Witherspoon (Dave Boling). In 2009 the agency opened a bookshop also called Lutyens & Rubinstein in Notting Hill.

Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer and translator from French, specialising in short prose. Recent translations include Stendhal’s treatise De l’Amour (On Love) for Hesperus Press (due Dec 2009) and Marcel Aymé’s 1941 novel Beautiful Image for Pushkin Press (July 2008). She writes for the TLS, PN Review, the Jewish Chronicle, the Liberal magazine, the Spectator and other publications. She is editor of Litro magazine, contributing editor to the International Literary Quarterly (www.interlitq.org) and also manages European operations for the American independent publisher Dalkey Archive Press (www.dalkeyarchive.com). She lives in London.