Jamie Lee Searle

Jamie Lee Searle is a literary translator, writer and mentor. She translates German-language and Portuguese-language writing into English for publishing houses and cultural institutions such as the Goethe Institut, Ingeborg Bachmann Centre and Austrian Cultural Forum. Her previous publications include Urs Faes’ Twelve Nights, Joachim B. Schmidt’s Kalmann and Anna Kim’s The Great Homecoming. Her co-translation (with Shaun Whiteside) of Florian Illies’ 1913 was a Sunday Times bestseller and Radio 4 Book of the Week. She was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for her translation of Valerie Fritsch’s novella Winter’s Garden.

Jamie is a co-founder of the Emerging Translators Network and a mentor with the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorship scheme. She also offers individual mentoring for translators at any stage of their career, and finds it incredibly rewarding to support people in developing a creative, fulfilling working life.

Jamie previously lectured at Queen Mary University of London where she completed an MA in Anglo-German Cultural Relations, for which her dissertation won the Jethro Bithell prize. She has also worked with the Stephen Spender Trust, coordinating their prize for poetry in translation.

She has held translation and writing residencies at Art Omi, New York, and the Austrian Literature Society, Vienna.

After living for many years in London and then South America, Jamie is now based back in the UK, where, when not translating, she can usually be found river- or sea-swimming, cooking, or working on her first novel.