Like many working in theatre and the creative industries more widely I have seen some of the projects I was looking forward to for 2020 impacted by the COVID-19 lockdown. I am grateful that the Royal Court has committed to re-programming Pablo Manzi’s A Fight Against… as soon as it can, and Global Voices Theatre are also hoping to stage our work-in-progress reading of Juan Pablo Aguilera’s La Jana at a later date.

Meanwhile, I’ve had some other ongoing projects that have been keeping me occupied during lockdown. Following the publication of Borja Ortiz de Gondra’s A Basque History (The Gondras) in 2018, I was so pleased to receive a grant from Spain’s Fundación SGAE to translate his follow-up play A Basque Story (The Other Gondras). This award-winning sequel sees the semi-fictional author of the original, semi-autobiographical play, face the fall-out from his success as his family reveal the resentment at having their troubled lives used as material for a play, and has already garnered high praise throughout Spain.

Other projects for later in the year have been ticking over: for Methuen Drama, I have been working on The Uncapturable, a reflection on the art of theatre by one of Argentina’s leading veteran directors, Rubén Szuchmacher.

This will be published later in the year, as will my translation of Housing Plan 2015-2045 by the Chilean playwright Bosco Israel Cayo Álvarez (author of Negra for the Royal Count in 2013), in the new anthology Department of Dreams, a collection of international dystopian plays by Laertes Press.

Still from Chile, following its world premiere at the Royal Court and subsequent production in Seattle, B by Guillermo Calderón will be produced in Vancouver this month by Rumble Theatre. This will be a free-to-view streaming production; it’s great that more people will be able to see this darkly comic study of the nature of activism in a post-dictatorship capitalist society.

Also continuing online in the light of COVID are the monthly meetings of the Out of the Wings Collective. This regular gathering to read a new English translation of a play have been a real tonic for me during the lockdown and I urge anyone interested in theatre – even if you have no experience of Spanish, Portuguese or translation – to join one of our sessions. They are friendly, relaxed, welcoming, and always full of discovery.

Like many literary translators I too have had some directly lockdown-related projects: for the Schloss Akademie in Germany, I translated this poignant reflection on the odd quietness of city life by the Argentine writer Giuliana Kiersz: From the Kitchen Window I See the World.

And finally, looking to the future: I am truly delighted to be able to confirm that I have been selected by the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) to be one of their two Translators in Residence for 2020/21, starting in October. This is a really exciting opportunity to work on a variety of translation projects and to explore the many aspects of literary translation with colleagues, students and other over a four-month period, and will follow my stint in July as one of the tutors at the BCLT summer school in July.

That’s all for now. Stay well, everyone!