Ra Page is the founder and CEO of Comma Press, and founder of the Northern Fiction Alliance, an umbrella organisation for independent publishers in the North. He is the editor, or co-editor, of multiple anthologies, including Resist: Stories of Uprising (2019), The New Uncanny (2008) (winner of the Shirley Jackson Award), The American Way (2020), and Monster Capital (2026), and is series editor of Comma’s Futures Past project. He is a former journalist and has also worked in film exhibition and production.

Founded by Ra Page and Sarah Eyre, and formally incorporated in 2007, Comma’s initial purpose was to redress the dearth of short story publishing opportunities in the UK, bringing award-winning writers like David Constantine, Sara Maitland and Adam Marek to new audiences. Our popular, long-running ‘Reading the City’ series has proven that people’s engagement with place can override other barriers to reading fiction in translation, and has now visited over 20 cities worldwide. Our interdisciplinary commissions celebrate the short story’s ability to take deep dives into cutting-edge research, and our ‘Futures Past’ series has delivered ground-breaking anthologies of science fiction from Palestine, Iraq, Kurdistan and elsewhere.

Andreas Jandl, born in 1975, studied Theatre, English and Romance Studies in Berlin, London, and Montreal. Since 2000, he has worked as a freelance translator from English and French into German. His translations include plays and novels by authors such as David Diop, Nicolas Dickner, Elisa Shua Dusapin, Robert Macfarlane, Gaétan Soucy and Joséphine Bacon. Notably, he translated The Peregrine by JA Baker, for which he and his co-translator Frank Sievers received the Christoph-Martin-Wieland Translation Prize in 2017. Jandl was awarded the Eugen-Helmlé Translation Prize for his oeuvre in 2021. In 2022, he joined CEATL as a delegate and became coordinator of CEATL’s Authors’ Rights Working Group one year later. He took part in the stakeholder consultations of the AI Office for the GPAI COP in 2024-25 and he is one of CEATL’s delegates to IFRRO.

Ambre Morvan is a Senior Public Policy Manager and Contracts Advisor at the Society of Authors. Before joining the SoA, Ambre spent five years as in-house counsel at La Société des Gens de Lettres, a French authors’ organisation. In her current role, she advises authors on publishing contracts and issues while also shaping the SoA’s public policy. She also looks after the Translators Association, one of the SoA’s special interest groups.

Luke Brown has worked as an editor for nearly twenty-five years, as a commissioning editor at Tindal Street Press, Granta and Serpent’s Tail, and as a freelance editor and copyeditor for most imprints by now, working predominantly on literary fiction. He is a novelist himself, and teaches creative writing at the University of Manchester.

Edward Gauvin translates from French with a personal focus on post-Surrealist literatures of the fantastic and graphic novels, of which he has translated more than 400 to date. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Guardian, and World Literature Today, and twice won the British Comparative Literature Association’s John Dryden Translation Competition. It has also been shortlisted for several major awards—the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, the National Translation Award—and twice nominated for French-American Foundation Translation Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, the Fulbright program, and the Centre National du Livre, as well as residencies from Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, the Banff Centre, and the Belgian government. As a translation advocate, he has written widely, spoken at universities and festivals, taught at the Bread Loaf Translation Conference. His original fiction and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, Lithub, Subtropics, and the Kenyon Review.

Photo © Quitterie de Fomervault Bernard

Ann Morgan is an author, speaker and literary activist based in Folkestone, UK. Her first book, Reading the World, came out of a 2012 blog project to read a book from every country in a year (ayearofreadingtheworld.com). Following media coverage in more than 40 nations, the project became a lifelong endeavour. This sees Ann continuing to blog about international literature, and corresponding and collaborating with writers, readers and literary organisations around the world to champion the sharing of stories underrepresented in mainstream anglophone publishing. As literary explorer of the Cheltenham Literature Festival and producer of the Royal Literary Fund’s Collected podcast, Ann works to platform diverse voices and translators, and to expand definitions of what storytelling can be.

Ann’s first novel, Beside Myself, has been translated into eight languages and was a bestseller in Italy. Her second novel, Crossing Over, drawing on her experience living close to where many of the small boats crossing the English Channel land, was published by Renard Press in 2023. Ann’s latest book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing (Renard Press, 2025) explores the unlearning that reading internationally requires, and celebrates how embracing incomprehension can help us read ourselves and our world better, and bring us together in all our difference and difficulty.

Photo © Igor Emmerich

The aim of these sessions is to give you an opportunity to pitch a translation project to a publisher in order to receive feedback on your presentation and tips on effective pitching strategies.

The publishers participating in the pitch your project sessions:

• Cheryl Robson, Aurora Metro
• François von Hurter, Bitter Lemon Press
• Trine Garrett, Foreign Affairs (theatre)
• Aina Marti-Balcells, Heloise Press
• Will Dady, Renard Press
• Elizabeth Briggs, Saqi Books
• Bishan Samaddar, Seagull Books
• Adam Levy, Transit Books
• Susan Harris, Words Without Borders 

Please note that pitching slots are limited and will be allocated on the basis of suitability. Attendees will be asked to apply for a pitching slot in June. Details of how to apply will be sent to confirmed attendees in the week commencing 8 June.

Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German Language Literature at the University of Oxford. She teaches and publishes especially on modern and contemporary poetry and also translates, especially German-language poetry: including books by Volker Braun, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein, Evelyn Schlag, Ulrike Almut Sandig, and Raoul Schrott. As a translator she has won many awards, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (twice), the  Frederick Nims Memorial Prize. Recent works have been shortlisted for the ALTA poetry award, the Weidenfeld prize and longlisted for the Dublin Literature Prize. Most recently she was awarded the Griffin Prize 2025 for her translation of Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 (Seagull, 2024).

1. Adam Z. Levy is the publisher of Transit Books, an independent publisher of award-winning literature from around the world, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Yana Genova (Bulgaria) is a cultural manager and researcher with nearly 30 years’ experience in international cultural cooperation, primarily in independent publishing and literary translation. In 2001, she founded the Next Page Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to international literary exchange, which in 2014 initiated the Sofia Literature and Translation House—an international hub for literary translation that also hosts a residency programme for writers and translators.

Over the years, Yana has served on the boards of several cultural organisations, including as President of the European network RECIT, and is a founding member of the Bulgarian online platform for reading promotion, Knigovishte. With a strong background in the independent sector, she has also worked as an advisor to the Bulgarian Minister of Culture and served as Deputy Mayor for Culture and Education of the City of Sofia. She is one of the four co-authors of the report “Books in Translation: Trends and Transformations in the European Publishing Market” (April 2026).

James Tookey is the co-publisher at Peirene Press and the administrator of the Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction.

Katy Derbyshire translates contemporary German writers including Judith Hermann, Clemens Meyer and Inka Parei. Based in Berlin for three decades, she co-hosts a monthly translation lab there and is a member of the Dead Ladies Show team presenting live shows and podcasts.

Photo © Nane Diehl

William Gregory is a dramaturg and translator from Spanish. Productions of his translations include A Fight Against… by Pablo Manzi (Royal Court, London) B by Guillermo Calderón (Royal Court; Washington Ensemble, Seattle); Villa by Guillermo Calderón (Royal Court; Play Company, New York); Cuzco by Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez (Theatre503, London), Chamaco by Abel González Melo (HOME, Manchester), The Concert by Ulises Rodríguez Febles (Royal Court; BBC), and various texts for the Royal Court’s Arena México and New Plays from Chile seasons, including Bosco Israel Cayo Álvarez’s Negra, the General’s Nurse.

Published work includes The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Plays, The Children of Taltal by Bosco Israel Cayo Álvarez (Egret Acting Editions, Laertes), Selected Plays by Cuban Playwright Abel González Melo (Methuen), The Uncapturable by Rubén Szuchmacher (Methuen), The Widow of Apablaza by Germán Luco Cruchaga (Inti Press), and contributions to Mexican Plays (Nick Hern), The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Argentinian Plays, and The Methuen Drama Book of Contemporary Uruguayan Plays, which he also co-edited with Sophie Stevens.

A visiting research associate at King’s College London, he is also a member of the Ibero-American theater and translation collective Out of the Wings. In 2024 he joined the artistic team of the Orange Tree Theatre, London, as Literary Associate.

Will Forrester is Head of Literature Programmes at English PEN. He edited All Walls Collapse: Stories of Separation (2022), led the editorial team for My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women (2022), and has been a judge for the TA First Translation Prize and the US National Translation Award. He is also a Director of Untold Narratives, an Independent Expert for Creative Europe, a Trustee of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and a Trustee of the Poetry Translation Centre. He sits on the advisory boards of BookBrunch, Translator magazine, and Sinoist Books. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, London Magazine, and elsewhere.

Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She has been awarded translation grants from the NEA and English PEN, a residency from the Hawthornden Foundation, and the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. Her other translations and co-translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and Kaoru Takamura. She served as co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee and currently represents the committee on PEN’s Board of Trustees.

Andrew White is the program director of membership & national engagement at PEN America. He comes to PEN America having spent much of his career working in non-profit theater as a playwright, director, actor, educator, and administrator, primarily with Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company. Most recently, White was an ensemble Member and served as Artistic Director (2010-2015) and Director of the Department of Curiosity (2016-2023). Andrew has worked in corporate, nonprofit, and classroom environments, structuring and facilitating conversations with participants around organizational and community issues.

Dr Kotryna Garanasvili is a writer, translator, and interpreter working with English, Lithuanian, French, German, Russian, and Georgian. She is an Assistant Professor of literature and translation, teaching at Vilnius University and University of East Anglia, where she has received a PhD in literary translation and serves as a member of the BCLT Research Group. She is a mentor as well as a previous mentee of the Emerging Translator Mentorship at the National Centre for Writing and has been awarded traineeships at the EU Council and the European Parliament. Read more about Kotryna on her webpage. Photo © A. J. Smith

Dr Sheela Mahadevan is Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Liverpool, where she teaches translation theory and literary translation. She is translator of the French novel Lakshmi’s Secret Diary by Ari Gautier (Columbia University Press, 2024), which was shortlisted for the 2025 Society of Authors TA First Translation Prize, and is author of the monograph Writing between Languages: Translation and Multilingualism in Indian Francophone Writing (Bloomsbury, 2025), which is part of the ‘Advances in Translation’ series.

Helen Vassallo is a British Maltese translator and Associate Professor of French and Translation at the University of Exeter (UK). Her recent and forthcoming translations include work by Leïla Slimani, Darina Al Joundi, Margarita García Robayo and Renée Vivien. She is the author of Towards a Feminist Translator Studies: Intersectional Activism in Translation and Publishing, co-author of Getting Started as a Literary Translator: Translated Literature and Publishing,and Translations Editor of the journal Feminist Translation Studies. Helen is founder of the Translating Women project, and from 2022-23 led an AHRC-funded network on diversity within the translated literature sector of the UK publishing industry.

Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German Language Literature at the University of Oxford. She teaches and publishes especially on modern and contemporary poetry and also translates, especially German-language poetry: including books by Volker Braun, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein, Evelyn Schlag, Ulrike Almut Sandig, and Raoul Schrott. As a translator she has won many awards, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (twice), the  Frederick Nims Memorial Prize. Recent works have been shortlisted for the ALTA poetry award, the Weidenfeld prize and longlisted for the Dublin Literature Prize. Most recently she was awarded the Griffin Prize 2025 for her translation of Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 (Seagull, 2024).

Ian Giles is an Edinburgh-based translator working from Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish into English. He has translated more than 40 Scandinavian titles to English, ranging from bestselling fiction to complex academic and cultural texts. Recent publications include high-profile translations of authors such as Camilla Läckberg and David Lagercrantz, as well as Andrev Walden’s international bestseller Bloody Awful in Different Ways. He served as the Chair of the Swedish-English Literary Translators’ Association (SELTA) for six years from 2018 and has served as the Chair of the Translators Association since 2023.

Photo © Camila França

Adrian Minckley is a literary translator from Portuguese. She is on the Steering Committee of the Translators Division of the National Union of Writers, USA. Her work has been published by Open Letter Press, Sublunary Editions, Two Lines, and Words Without Borders, among others. She lives and works along the Rio Grande.

Francesca Novajra is a translator of fiction and non-fiction for children and adults, from English, French and Portuguese into Italian. After a degree in translation in Geneva and a degree in interpreting in Trieste, she worked for a printer of picture book co-editions, as an editorial assistant for a publisher of children’s books and for a children’s museum. She has translated over two hundred books and held translation workshops and masterclasses. In 2017 she was honoured to be awarded the Astrid Lindgren Prize of the International Federation of Translation (FIT). Member of AITI (Italian association of translators and interpreters), long-standing literary translation advocate and activist, she is chair of CEATL, the European Council of Literary Translators’ Association.

Over the past four decades Ros Schwartz has translated over 100 fiction and non-fiction titles from French. In 2010, she published a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and her recent translated works include Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance and Selfies by Sylvie Weil. She is one of the team re-translating Georges Simenon’s works for Penguin Classics; 2022 saw the publication of her translation of Max Lobe’s Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? (HopeRoad) and 2023 her translation of Simone Weil’s The Need For Roots (Penguin Classics) was released. She recently published her translation of Ryota Kurumado’s manga version of Camus’ The Outsider (Penguin Classics). 2025 saw her translation of Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men become a global bestseller, and 2026 sees the publication of her latest translation: Khalid  Lyamlahy’s Venice Requiem. Ros gives talks and masterclasses around the world and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. In 2009 she was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2017 she was the recipient of the UK Institute of Translation and Interpreting’s John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence.

Beth Hickling-Moore is a translator from Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian into English. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Stinging Fly, Wasafiri, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, and Circumference, among other journals. Beth was the recipient of the 2025 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature for Alessandra Mureddu’s ‘Arcade’. Her forthcoming translations include Paulina Chiziane’s ‘The Seventh Oath’, from Mozambican Portuguese (Archipelago Books); ‘Clean Houses’ by Spanish author María Agúndez (Manilla Press), and ‘A Delicate Collection of Absences’ by Brazilian author Aline Bei (Summit Books).

Photo © Jannine Newman

Gitanjali Patel is an award-winning researcher and a Wolfson postgraduate scholar at the University of Birmingham, where her research focusses on translation as a critical pedagogy. She is also the director of Shadow Heroes, an organisation that supports young people in embracing all sides of their linguistic and cultural heritages through critical and creative translation workshops.

Madeleine Rogers is an editor, proofreader, bookseller and literary translator. She studied French and Italian at the University of Oxford and holds an MA in Translation Studies from UCL. Her translations of Nolwenn Le Blevennec’s novels As the Eagle Flies and Friends and Lovers were published by Peirene Press in 2023 and 2025 respectively. She lives in Margate.

Photo © Alice Rogers

Elizabeth Briggs is Publishing Director at Saqi Books. Her experience in the book industry over the past decade spans agenting, writing, the non-for-profit literary sector and independent publishing. She has acted as a consultant to international publishers including Zvaigzne (Latvia) and participated in professional fellowships in Bulgaria, Estonia, Georgia and the UAE. She has collaborated with some of the industry’s most prominent voices and spoken at festivals including Hay-on-Wye, LBF and Essex Book Festival. Elizabeth is a trustee of the international arts and cultural festival Shubbak. She has a degree in Classics from Durham University. Her first book Dissenters: Britain’s Lost Faiths and Forgotten Radicals is forthcoming (HarperCollins, April 2027).