Cultural activities

Translating Sally Rooney

Each year, to celebrate European Day of Languages (26th September) and International Translation Day (30th September), the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation works with EUNIC (the EU National Institutes for Culture) to bring together an outstanding Irish author with a group of their translators, to discuss how Irish literature is made available to people living in different cultural contexts. This year, our special guests are Sally Rooney, award-winning author of Normal People, and her translators into Romanian, Slovenian and Spanish.

This event will be in hybrid format, meaning you can choose to attend in-person or online.

Sally Rooney is an Irish novelist. She is the author of Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You. She was born in 1991 in Castlebar, County Mayo. She lives in Dublin and studied English and American Literature at Trinity. She won the 2017 Sunday Times/Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award.

Mihaela Buruiană is a Romanian translator. She holds a BA in English and French and has translated over 40 books (fiction and non-fiction, for children and adults alike), among which: Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter, Happiness, by Aminatta Forna, Goggle Eyes, by Anne Fine, Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry, Hamnet and I Am, I Am, I Am, by Maggie O’Farrell. She has also signed the translations of two of Sally Rooney’s novels: Normal People (Oameni normali) and Beautiful World, Where Are You (Lume frumoasă, unde ești), both published by Curtea Veche Publishing.

Born in Ljubljana and raised in South America (Colombia) until the age of seventeen (attending bilingual, Spanish-English, schools), Vesna Velkovrh Bukilica studied Art History at the University of Ljubljana. After extensive journalistic work (comprising more than 400 articles) and independent (published) research in art history, she started focussing on literary translation (mainly – but not exclusively - from English, Spanish, and French), which remains her main line of work. So far, she has translated around 50 books, mostly novels by some of the most prominent writers of the 20th century, including G. García Márquez, J. L. Borges, J. Cortázar, Arundhati Roy, and many others.

Inga Pellisa (Barcelona, 1979) landed her first job in publishing as a bookshop clerk, an experience that drove her to switch her university studies from Chemistry to Humanities. After several years working as an editor, which granted her a broad perspective on publishing, her interests led her to translation. Since 2011, she has had more than sixty translations published, ranging from fiction to non-fiction and graphic novels. Her authors include Janet Malcolm, George Orwell, Angela Davis, Ishmael Reed, Emma Cline, Garth Greenwell, Megan Hunter, John Lanchester, Judith Butler, Richard Hoggart, Patricia Lockwood, Natasha Brown, Julian Barnes and, of course, Sally Rooney.

Organizers