Thomas Bunstead

Thomas Bunstead has translated novels by some of the leading Spanish-language writers working today, including Agustín Fernández Mallo, Bernardo Atxaga and Enrique Vila-Matas, with shorter-form translations appearing in publications from Granta to The Guardian and VICE. His translation of Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve was shortlisted for the 2020 LA Times Art Seidenbaum award for First Fiction, was a finalist in the 2020 National Translation awards, one of two translations in the Publishers Weekly Top Ten Books of 2019, and a New York Times ‘Notable Book’ of 2019. He has twice been a winner of PEN Translates awards.

Thomas’s own writing, which tends to land somewhere between fiction and creative nonfiction, has appeared with the likes of LitHub, the Paris Review and the White Review, and his novel Semblance was shortlisted for the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions novel prize. He was co-editor of In Other Words, a literary translation journal published by the National Centre for Writing, from 2015–2020.

A graduate of the Creative Writing MA programme at Royal Holloway, University of London, Thomas has taken part in literary events from Edinburgh to the London Review Bookshop to Xalapa in Mexico, and taught languages, creative writing and translation to everyone from primary school students to postgraduates and fully fledged writers and literary translators. Thomas was born in London and, after travels in Latin America, a stint working in TV in Madrid, and too many odd jobs to mention in between, now lives with his partner and two daughters in Pembrokeshire where he is involved in conservation and food security projects.