An announcement from The Queen’s Translation Exchange, regarding its Residency.
From 1st – 10th June 2023, in partnership with the Sasakawa Foundation, the Daiwa Foundation and the Stephen Spender Trust, the Queen’s College Translation Exchange will welcome award-winning Japanese author and translator Aoko Matsuda to Oxford for a residency with her English translator, Polly Barton. This joint residency forms part of Polly Barton’s ongoing TORCH HCP Visiting Fellowship and year-long translation residency at The Queen’s College, Oxford.
During their residency, Matsuda and Barton will deliver a series of public events exploring translation, writing and contemporary Japanese literature. The residency will build on the success of previous joint translation residencies at the Queen’s Translation Exchange, including South Korean writer Bora Chung and translator Anton Hur (2021), Russian poet Galina Rymbu and translator Helena Kernan (2020) and Galician poet Chus Pato and translator Erin Moure (2019). To hear more details about this residency and our programme of events, please sign-up to the Queen’s College Translation Exchange mailing list here, or keep an eye on the TORCH website here.
Aoko Matsuda is a writer and translator. In 2013, her debut book, Stackable, was nominated for the Mishima Yukio Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize. In 2019, her short story ‘The Woman Dies’ was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. In 2021, Her short story collection Where the Wild Ladies Are (tr. Polly Barton), published by Tilted Axis Press was selected as one of the 10 Best Fiction Book of 2020 by TIME, and won and World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 2021. She has translated work by Karen Russell, Amelia Gray and Carmen Maria Machado into Japanese.
Polly Barton is a writer and translator of Japanese literature and non-fiction, based in Bristol. In 2019, she was awarded the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for her non-fiction debut Fifty Sounds (Fitzcarraldo Editions/Liveright), and has just released her second non-fiction work with Fitzcarraldo, Porn: An Oral History (2023). In 2021, her translation of Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press/Soft Skull Press, 2020) won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.
