Speaker

Alison Watts

Alison Watts won the inaugaural Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize for The Boy and the Dog by Seishu Hase in 2023 and the Kyoko Selden Memorial Japanese Translation Prize in 2021 for an excerpt from Durian Sukegawa’s travel memoir A Dosimeter on the Narrow Road to Oku. She has translated contemporary fiction from authors such as Michiko Aoyama, Naoki Matayoshi and Riku Onda, as well as sashiko craft books. Her latest translation, How To Use 3000 Yen by Hika Harada, will be released from Scribner in September. Alison lived in Ibaraki Prefecture for over thirty years before moving to Adelaide where she continues to translate and also teach sashiko.

Sessions

Panel: Windows on literary translation

Literary translation is a field about which many are curious. In this session, three high-profile literary translators, Tomoko Aoyama, Matthew Stavros and Alison Watts, shed light on its inner workings from their niche perspectives. They will touch on questions of dialect, gender, genre, styles, readerships and even – gasp – money, to identify the issues, challenges, trends, inspirations and...

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