Daniel Hahn

Daniel Hahn Royal Society of Literature FRSL Order of the British Empire OBE (born 26 November 1973) is a British writer, editor, book reviewer, and award-winning translator. As an edItor he shared, with Leonie Flynn and Susan Reuben, the 2004 Blue Peter Book Award for Best Book with Facts (The Ultimate Book Guide). In 2020 Hahn was elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was appointed Order of the British Empire Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). Quotes There are so many interesting Brazilian writers I’d like to get my hands on. The Granta Best Young Brazilian Novelists a few years back identified twenty writers aged under forty, and there’s a lot there still waiting for the speaking world Anglophone world to welcome them in. For that collection, I translated short work by two of those writers, Antonio Prata and Cristhiano Aguiar, both of whom deserve full English-language books; there’s another on that list, Julián Fuks, who’s bound to be discovered by the English-speaking world before long. And there are a lot of Brazilian writers I have already translated but of whom I’d like to do a lot more — I’ve done one extraordinary short novel by Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares and would love to do a second, I’d like to do more Paulo Scott, too, and so many others… as quoted by interviewer identified as "The Punch" in: British writer, editor and translator Daniel Hahn, who has translated José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion, on the art of translation and ‘being a translator’ June 30, 2017 The Punch Magazine https://thepunchmagazine.com/the-byword/interviews/as-a-translator-i-amp-rsquo-m-not-an-anxious-perfectionist-daniel-hahn Once you’ve agreed what makes a Children's literature children’s book in the first place (which isn’t as easy as one might think…), I think the basic measures of quality for children’s fiction are the same as for adult fiction. How well Plot (narrative) plotted, how well imagined, the commitment to a voice and the skill in realizing it, the aliveness of the Character (arts) characters, the vividness of the world, the originality and wit and surprise and charm and everything else that demanding readers look for in great writing. Books for younger children tend to be heavily illustrated, in a way that most adult books aren’t (more’s the pity…), a fact that of course brings with it a whole other set of ways in which a book can succeed or fail. (The illustrations and their relationship to the text aren’t, of course, minor factors incidental to the substance of the book, they are among the hardest things to get perfectly right.) as quoted by Sarah Coolidge in: Children’s Literature in Translation: An Interview with Daniel Hahn Center for the Art of Translation October 2017 https://www.catranslation.org/feature/childrens-literature-in-translation-an-interview-with-daniel-hahn/ Svetlana Alexievich has a Nobel Prize in Literature Nobel prize, and deserves it. But while she doesn’t need any recognition from me, I’ve just given the team behind her book a prize: the £2,000 TA First Translation Prize Translators Association first translation award. Why? Well, I thought Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets Second-Hand Time was stunning. But my Russian is terrible, so I only read it in 2016, when it was published in English, through the work of translator Bela Shayevich and Fitzcarraldo Editions Fitzcarraldo editor Jacques Testard. Nobody is likely ever to give the literature Nobel to a translator or editor – so my prize has gone to them.One of our shortlisted books, Prabda Yoon The Sad Part Was, was the first work of modern Thai literature Thai fiction published in the UK.In 2017, working with the Society of Authors and with support from the British Council, I established the TA first translation prize, using my €25,000 (£22,000) winnings from another award, the Dublin Literary Award International Dublin literary award. Its aim was to highlight the work of translators new to the profession, and of the editors who work with them.Literary translation is a difficult profession to break into. Plenty of people want to do it, but in the insular English-speaking world, there’s regrettably little work to go around, and it’s easier for publishers to entrust their books to already-known translators who are seen as less of a risk. Translators are the vanguard of literary change: we need better recognition 1 March 2018 The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/mar/01/translators-vanguard-literary-prize-ta-translation External links Prizes https://www.danielhahn.co.uk/prizes.html Daniel Hahn (www.danielhahn.co.uk) Daniel Hahn's profile in The Guardian Category:1973 births Category:Living people Category:Editors from England Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Category:Non-fiction authors from England Category:People from London Category:Translators from England