Adriana Hunter

Adriana Hunter is an award-winning translator of French. Since ‘discovering’ the first book she was to translate in 1998, she has translated more than eighty books, mostly works of literary fiction. She continues to enjoy the buzz of identifying promising francophone authors and finding English-language publishers for them. She won the 2011 Scott-Moncrieff prize for her translation of Véronique Olmi’s Bord de Mer (Beside the Sea), and the 2013 French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation translation prize for her translation of Hervé Le Tellier’s Electrico W, and was shortlisted twice for the Independent foreign fiction prize (now the Man Booker international prize).

Translation combines creativity with accuracy, and faithfulness to the author with duty to the reader; and Adriana relishes the challenges – and the fun – afforded by these tensions. She thinks of her job as ‘juggling with words’ and derives particular pleasure from passing on her passion for words. In 2014, she taught the Advanced Translation (French) module for undergraduates at the University of East Anglia for one semester, and she has twice run the French workshop during the British Centre for Literary Translation’s week-long summer school.

Her love affair with the French language dates back to four years in a French school during her childhood, and she has a first-class honours degree in French and Drama from Goldsmiths, University of London. After leaving university she worked as a film publicist, a freelance writer of nonfiction and a mother of three. She lives in Kent.