Margaret Jull Costa

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Margaret Jull Costa is a translator of Portuguese and Spanish fiction and poetry, including the works of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, Javier Marías and José Régio.

[edit] Works and awards

Margaret Jull Costa was joint-winner of the Portuguese Translation Prize in 1992 for The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, and was runner-up in 1996 and 2002 for The Relic by Eça de Queirós and The Migrant Painter of Birds by Lidia Jorge.

With Spanish novelist Javier Marías she won the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the Harvill edition of his novel A Heart So White.

In recent years she has been noted for her work in translating the novels of José Saramago. Her translation of All the Names won the 2000 Weidenfeld Translation Prize, while her translation of Death at Intervals, about a country where death ceases to exist, was published in 2008 [2].

As part of its Europe 1992-2004 programme, the UK publishers Dedalus embarked on a series of new translations by Jull Costa of some of the major classics of Portuguese literature. These include seven works by Eça de Queirós: Cousin Bazilio (1878, translation published 2003, funded by the Arts Council of England), The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers, The Mandarin (and Other Stories), The Relic, The Crime of Father Amaro, The Maias and The City and the Mountains (to be published August 2008).

In 2006 she was short-listed for the Oxford Weidenfeld translation prize for her translation of the first part of Javier Marías's trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, and also won the Arts Council, Spanish Embassy and Instituto Cervantes translation prize for the same work. [3]

She has recently published her English translation of The Accordionist's Son by the Basque author Bernardo Atxaga (Harvill Secker 2007) [4] [5], while her previous translations of Atxaga's work include The Lone Man (1996) and The Lone Woman (1999).

Her translation of The Maias by Eça de Queirós, published by Dedalus in 2007 and described by José Saramago as "the greatest book by Portugal's greatest novelist", won the 2008 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize.[1].

[edit] References

  1. ^ Dedalus Books, News [1]

[edit] External links

  • Dedalus Books, Sawtry, Cambridgeshire, UK publishers [6]