Having singularly failed to do the promised frequent updates, I will try to make this December round-up brief…

I chose today, because the month began with the wonderful news that the Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Plays has been selected as a finalist for the prestigious Valle-Inclán Award for literary translation from Spanish to English, awarded by the Society of Authors of Great Britain.  It means a huge amount to have this recognition from my peers and I hope the nomination will encourage more translators, publishers and theatres to take an interest in theatre translation.

The anthology includes Blanca Doménech’s The Sickness of Stone, which featured at the Columbia International Playwriting Festival in June, and Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez’s Cuzco, which had its UK premiere at Theatre503 in January and will be appearing in the US for the first time on December 13 at Escena Sur, produced by LaMicro Theater.

Also this month, we look forward to the launch of the Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Argentinian Plays, edited by Catherine Boyle.  I was delighted to be invited to translated two plays for this volume (Franco Calluso’s Nou Fiuter and Juan Ignacio Fernández’s Poor Men’s Poetry), alongside my esteemed colleagues from the Out of the Wings collective.  The volume will be launched on December 6 at the Roundhouse in London, and all are welcome (but booking required at this link).

Talking of Out of the Wings, we enjoyed another wonderful sharing of plays from Ibero-America this year at our fourth and most-successful-yet festival, at the Omnibus Theatre in south London.  I loved working with director Kate O’Connor on my translation of Gabriela Aguilera’s Cassandra, Sandra.  We are looking forward to OOTW’s fifth festival in 2020, plans are already afoot!

Also in 2020 I am looking forward to the world premiere of Pablo Manzi’s astonishing A Fight Against at London’s Royal Court Theatre in May.  I have already been working closely with the playwright and director Sam Pritchard on this brilliant piece and I can’t wait to get into rehearsals.

December has also marked a moment to catch my breath and do some much overdue website updates.  Not least, the addition of Outside the Game by the Cuban playwright Abel González Melo.  Based on true events, this play imagines the behind-the-scenes downfall of Heberto Padilla, one of Cuba’s most celebrated writers who was unceremoniously cut down by the regime in the late 1960s.  A reminder that we are all at risk when those in power suddenly change their minds about the meaning of patriotism.

And language, nation and identity were explored in PEN/Opp’s latest edition which I was thrilled to translate for for the first time.  In Being Jts’ibajom te jbats’I k’optik, Ruperta Bautista, writer, translator, and anthropologist, tells us what it means for her to write in her mother tongue Tsotsil, while Enriqueta Lunez, born in Chiapas in Mexico in 1981, is a poet and writer who belongs to the new generation of Tsotsil writers in the country writing in Tsotsil instead of Spanish.

Last but certainly not least, I have really enjoyed doing more knowledge-sharing and teaching this latter half of the year.  In the summer I ran a theatre translation workshop at Theatre503 and in the autumn I was at the University of Leicester talknig to MA students about the ins and outs of translating for the stage.

More anon…