Alyson Coombes
  • Home
  • About me
  • Literary Translation
  • Spoiler Alert! reviews
  • I recommend
  • Blog
  • Contact
Picture
In September 2015 I completed an MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, during which I focused on the translation of prose fiction into English. I am very interested in contemporary German-language fiction, in particular fiction set during the Second World War, or dealing with the aftermath or the legacy of the war and the Holocaust.

In Spring 2015 I won one of six places for the Emerging Translators Programme, run by the journal New Books in German, as part of which I attended a one-day workshop and translated an extract from a novel by Sibylle Berg.

In November 2015 I attended the Crossing Border Festival in The Hague as a translator in residence, where I translated daily blog posts written by German author Olga Grjasnowa as part of The Chronicles project. The blog posts are available both in German and English on the Crossing Border website. The festival was followed by a ten-day stay at the Translators’ House Amsterdam, kindly funded by the Dutch Foundation for Literature. During my stay I attended one-to-one mentoring sessions with literary translator Shaun Whiteside and worked on translating an extract from Olga Grjasnowa's novel Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe. 


My sample translation from Tim Krohn's novel Aus dem Leben einer Matratze bester Machart is available in the literary translation magazine no man's land, along with my translation of an extract from Schildkrötensoldat by Melinda Nadj Abonji, who won the German and Swiss Book Prizes in 2010 for her novel Tauben fliegen auf.

My co-translation of Nagars Nacht (Eichmann's Executioner) by Astrid Dehe and Achim Engstler was published in the US by The New Press in July 2017. This novel was translated together with fellow literary translator Helen MacCormac.



Praise for Eichmann’s Executioner 
"An admirably translated work, highly recommended for students of that tragedy and readers of historical and literary fiction in general."
-- Library Journal (starred) 

Praise for the German edition: 
"Both curiously transparent and full of secrets, a simultaneously dense yet airy fabric of cryptic threads and references…Nothing is gratuitous in this book, nothing coincidental; all is intricately interlaced."
-- Frankfurter Rundschau 

"A fascinating book that doesn’t let you go…It intentionally and repeatedly unsettles the reader. It poses important questions about humanity and consciousness, about what you are capable of doing."
-- Neues Deutschland 

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.