Public discussion: authors Elizabeth Hay, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Evelyne de la Chenelière
Wednesday, June 25 · 8 p.m. · Rolston Recital Hall · The Banff Centre · Free
Information: 1-800-413-8368 or 762-6301
Presented as part of the 2008 Banff Summer Arts Festival
Awarded the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Elizabeth Hay’s novel Late Nights on Air centres on a public radio station in Yellowknife, tracing the lives and emotions of the motley characters who have landed there at various stages in their careers. It is an intense, often funny study of how people relate to each other and how they relate to their environments.
This month, Hay is at The Banff Centre to work with Nina van Rossem, Dutch translator of her bestseller, as part of the unique Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC) program. On June 25, Hay will participate in a public discussion with novelist Shauna Singh Baldwin and Montreal-based playwright Evelyne de la Chenelière, two award-winning writers also involved in this year’s program.
Founded in 2003 and the only program of its kind in North America, BILTC is an annual three-week residency for established translators. They are given time and space for uninterrupted work on current publication projects, often with the writers whose work they are translating. The program focuses on translations of Canadian publications into a variety of international languages, and the translation of international works of fiction into French, Spanish, and English for readers in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Other writers who have participated in the program include Yann Martel, Ann-Marie Macdonald, Edward P. Jones, and Joseph Boyden.
BILTC’s 2008 projects include the translation of: Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers into Bulgarian by Nevena Dishlieva-Krysteva; de la Chenelière’s play Désordre public into Spanish by Humberto Pérez Mortera; Tod Wodicka’s acclaimed first novel into German by Anke Burger; a Bohumil Hrabal memoir from Czech by Tony Liman; Anne Hébert into Dutch by Pauline Sarkar; Siba al-Harez’s controversial novel The Others from Arabic to English by Marilyn Booth; and a project by Chiapas, Mexico-based writer Enriqueta Lunez Pérez to translate her own work, Xvi’lajet mutetik, from Tzotzil into Spanish in consultation with BILTC faculty, including award-winning Mexican poet and translator Pura López Colomé, Barbara Harshav, Hugh Hazelton, and BILTC director Susan Ouriou.