Otley Bookfest 2026 - Work in Translation

Work in Translation
Sunday 29 November • Doors 11.30am • Showtime 12 noon – 2pm
Wesley Hall, Walkergate, Otley

Josh Sutton hosts a lunchtime session on what happens to a book when it crosses a language. He's joined by three people from the University of Leeds: Terry Bradford, who translates French and teaches others to do it; Thea Pitman on Latin American writing; and Mike Baynham on what happens to language when cultures mix.

Terry Bradford

Terry Bradford teaches French, translation and interpreting at the University of Leeds. Working as a professional translator since 2001, since turning 50, he has focused on his passion for literary translation. Wakefield Press (US) and Liverpool University Press (GB) have published his translations of works by Boris Vian, Léon-Paul Fargue, Clément Pansaers, & Clémentine Mélois. Snugglybooks (US) are publishing his translations of two books by André de Lorde – France's "Prince of Terror" – as well as an erotic novel by Jane de La Vaudère. He is a regular contributor – of short translations, commentaries and creative pseudo-translations – to US literary journal Typo: The International Journal of Prototypes. He lives in Otley and is often to be found reading a book in one of the town's finest pubs.

Thea Pitman

Thea Pitman is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research interests lie in the field of contemporary Latin American cultural production, especially online, and more broadly digital, works, as well as the appropriation of new media technologies by indigenous communities. She has published the anthology Latin American Cyberliterature and Cyberculture (LUP, 2007) and the book Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production (Routledge, 2013), both with Claire Taylor, as well as numerous other articles and pieces of short-form scholarship. Her current research focuses on indigenous new media arts in the Americas.

Mike Baynham

Mike is a translator and poet from Otley. A retired academic, he has returned to an early passion for poetry translation, translating mainly from Spanish, and more recently from Arabic, Persian and Kurdish. He is an editor with Other Tongue Mother Tongue, magazine of multilingual poetry by migrant and refugee poets. His translations have been published in a number of publications, including Artrage, Dawn Hunter, Las Flechas de Artemis and Transference.

He is currently collaborating with the Moroccan zejal poet Adil Latefi and with the Kurdish Syrian poet, Ceger Hillo. His translation of a poem by the iconic modernist Persian poet Sohrab Sepehri was awarded a commendation in the 2022 Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize and he has recently completed a translation of Sohrab’s long poem, The Water’s Footsteps.

His translation from the work of Adil Latefi gained second prize in the 2023 Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize. He collaborated with Jiyar Homer on translations from Kurdish of the poetry of Dilawar Karadaghi, published as My Country’s Hair Turned White (Arc 2025). A self-confessed language glutton, he speaks French, Spanish and Italian with varying degrees of fluency and has been a student of Arabic for most of his adult life. In his other life as a sociolinguist he has published a book with Tong King Lee on multilingualism and translation, Translation and Translanguaging (Routledge, 2018), recently translated into Greek.

Tickets £10 (Plus a small booking fee)

We want everyone to feel welcome at Otley Common. If you have any access requirements or need any support to attend this event, please get in touch with us before the day and we'll do our best to help. hello@otleycommon.org