Join Peirene Press to celebrate the art of translation! Emceed by Christophe Fricker, Jo Heinrich and Marielle Sutherland come face to face, showcasing their respective translations of the same German text.
It’s back! Following the success of last year’s Translation Slam, we’re bringing two more acclaimed translators face to face.
The idea is simple: two translators are given exactly the same text and each discuss their respective translations with a moderator.
The aim: to celebrate the creativity and individual skill that has gone into each version.
This year, we’ve chosen to spotlight German translation. The German text will be available in advance of the event, so the audience can have a go at translating it ahead of the duel.
Peirene Press would like to thank Arts Council England for their help in funding this event.
Jo Heinrich
Jo’s first full-length literary translation, Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp, published by Peirene Press, won the 2023 Dublin Literary Award. Other translations include Oskamp’s Half Swimmer (2024) and Matthias Jügler’s Mayfly Season (2026). She has also translated non-fiction such as The Invention of Good and Evil by Hanno Sauer (2024) and Jan van Aken’s How Wars End (2025), and she was part of a team of translators working on Angela Merkel’s memoirs, Freedom, in 2024. She lives just outside Bristol with her family.
Marielle Sutherland
Marielle Sutherland was born in 1976 in Hartlepool. She has a PhD in German and is a translator at the German Historical Institute London. Her publications include Selected Poems: Rainer Maria Rilke (co-translated with Susan Ranson), Rulantica: Hidden Island, by Michaela Hanauer, A Simple Intervention by Yael Inokai, and the poetry collection People in Their Time by Kornelia Koepsell. Marielle Sutherland was awarded the Peirene Stevns Translation Prize in 2023.
Christophe Fricker
Christophe Fricker has recently translated Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate and A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh into German and Hartmut Rosa’s Situation und Konstellation into English (the latter two are forthcoming, the former is causing a stir among reviewers who had not expected to ever see a novel in formal verse enter the German market). He is also the programme director of the University of Bristol’s MA Translation and Intercultural Studies.
