Great Irish Writers in Translation: Anne Enright

Each year, to celebrate European Day of Languages (26th September) and International Translation Day (30th September), Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation works with EUNIC Ireland (the EU National Institutes for Culture) to bring together an outstanding Irish writer with some of their European translators, to discuss how Irish literature is made available to people living in different cultural contexts.

This year, our special guest is award-winning writer Anne Enright and her translators into Polish and Romanian, Kaja Gucio and Iulia Gorzo. Both translators are working on Anne's latest novel 'The Wren, The Wren'. They will be interviewed by Professor Michael Cronin of Trinity College Dublin. 

The event will be in hybrid format, so you may choose to attend in-person or online. It is organised in partnership with EUNIC Ireland, and is kindly supported by Polish and Romanian embassies in Dublin.

Anne Enright

Photo by Hugh Chaloner

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three collections of stories, collected as Yesterday’s Weather; one book of non-fiction, Making Babies; seven novels including The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year and won the Irish Fiction Award and the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award and which won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. From 2015 to 2018, she was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her latest novel, The Wren, The Wren was published by Jonathan Cape and WW Norton & Company in August 2023.

Polish

Romanian

Kaja Gucio

Iulia Gorzo

Kaja Gucio is a Polish-English translator and interpreter with over twenty years’ experience. She has translated more than 200 journal articles and papers (literature, cultural studies, social science, arts, and history) and over 30 books – fiction, non-fiction and academic publications – both from and into English, including critically acclaimed titles as Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Miriam Teows’ Women Talking, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Toni Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye. She has also translated work by Irish writers including Liz Nugent (Strange Sally Diamond), Louise Kennedy (Trespasses), Paul Lynch (Prophet Song) and Anne Enright.

Iulia Gorzo began translating 20 years ago, first as a hobby, after obtaining a bachelor’s degree in psychology. The hobby became a profession and she now translates films and TV shows from English, French and Italian to Romanian and books mainly from English to Romanian. Her favourite translated authors include Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, Anthony Doerr, Alice Walker and Frank McCourt. In 2014, she was awarded the “Andrei Bantaș Translation Prize” for the Romanian version of Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth. Since 2022 she has been writing about her work in a translator’s diary published by the Romanian cultural platform Scena9.

If you enjoy events about literary translation, take a look at what else we have planned at the Centre, here.

Last year, Sebastian Barry was in conversation with his French, German and Polish translators, Laetitia Devaux, Hans-Christian Oeser and Aga Zano. You can watch the recording of this event here: