UK Experts – Year 2014

Gary McKeone has worked in literature at London's South Bank, with Field Day Theatre Company in Ireland and as Literature Director at Arts Council England. He is currently Chair of the Poetry Archive and the recently Poetry Translation Centre and is also involved with a number of other literature organisations in England. Originally from Derry, he has written for the Guardian and Independent newspapers and currently works as Programme Director at St George’s House, Windsor Castle.

Laurence Laluyaux was born in Paris. She studied French literature and taught French in the US before moving to England where she took an MA in Comparative Literature at University College London. She worked as a translator and joined literary agency Rogers Coleridge & White ten years ago, where she heads the foreign rights team and has her own list of authors. Those include Chico Buarque, Daniel Galera, Milton Hatoum, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Michel Laub and Valeria Luiselli, amongst others.

David Lea is Deputy Manager and one of the founding team at the London Review Bookshop. The bookshop started in 2003 and is located in Bloomsbury. It has a selection of more than 20,000 titles, from the classics of world literature to the cutting edge of contemporary fiction and poetry.

Alessandro Gallenzi is the founder of Alma books, publishing around eighty titles a year, mainly in the field of contemporary literary fiction and classics, half of its titles are translations from languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, German and Japanese. From the Spanish they have translated and published Carmen Posadas, Alberto Manguel and Clara Sánchez. In 2013 Alma won Independent Publisher of the Year at the Bookseller Industry Awards. As well as being a literary publisher, Alessandro is a prize-winning translator, a poet, a playwright and a novelist.

Anne Meadows is a Junior Editor at Granta and Portobello books, one of the most prestigious and independently-minded publishing houses in the UK, where she acquires literary fiction and non-fiction. Prior to Granta, she read for a literary agent at A.P. Watt and spent a summer working on literary television for the BBC. She is always on the lookout for new writers with ambition and intelligence who believe that words are the best medium we have to share our messy, joyful, troubling experiences of being human. Her authors include Alejandro Zambra, Donald Antrim, Frances Larson, Jáchym Topol and Katrine Kielos.

Christina MacSweeney has an MA in Literary Translation from UEA and specialises in Latin American fiction. She has published a translation of Valeria Luiselli’s novel Faces in the Crowd (Granta, 2012) and a collection of narrative essays by the same author entitled Sidewalks (Granta, May 2013). Her work has appeared in Booktrust, Words without Borders, Litro, The Drawbridge, The Creative Literary Studio and Brick Magazine, among others. In 2013, her translation of a collection of essays by the Paraguayan art critic Ticio Escobar (The Invention of Distance) was published in a bilingual edition by the AICA/Fausto.