Daniel Hahn

"There are so many interesting Brazilian writers I’d like to get my hands on. The ' Best Young Brazilian Novelists a few years back identified twenty writers aged under forty, and there’s a lot there still waiting for the to welcome them in. For that collection, I translated short work by two of those writers, and , both of whom deserve full English-language books; there’s another on that list, , 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 and would love to do a second, I’d like to do more , too, and so many others…"

"Once you’ve agreed what makes a 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 ted, how well imagined, the commitment to a voice and the skill in realizing it, the aliveness of the s, 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.)"

"has a , 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 . Why? Well, I thought 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 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, ', was the first work of modern published in the UK. In 2017, working with the and with support from the , I established the TA first translation prize, using my €25,000 (£22,000) winnings from another award, the . 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 , 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."