Theatre Translator Mentorship Announcement 2022

Lise Lærdal Bryn is a translator and actor from the Western fjords of Norway. In 2018, she graduated from the University of Redlands in California with a self-designed BA entitled ‘Cross-cultural Storytelling: a bilingual study of literary, visual and dramatic narrative’, which combined translation studies, creative writing, theatre arts, literature, and film. Since then, she worked briefly as an actor and then turned her focus to translation, pursuing an MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia; she completed a dissertation on theatre translation in September 2021, critically engaging with her own translation of the Norwegian play Francesca by Tonje Dreyer Sellevoll. She was thrilled to be selected as one of the NCW’s Emerging Literary Translator mentees from October 2021 to March 2022, working with Kari Dickson on prose translation, and she’s excited to pivot back to theatre translation in her mentorship with Foreign Affairs.

Marco Young is a British-Italian actor and translator originally from Cambridge. He trained as an actor at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, graduating in 2018. He has worked as a commercial translator since then alongside acting, with clients ranging from companies in the City to independent magazines and cultural publications. He has been translating theatre from Italian to English since 2020, focusing on contemporary Italian pieces dealing with themes of migration and journeys. Acting credits include: Another America (Park Theatre), Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (Pitlochry Festival Theatre), My Cousin Rachel (Bath Theatre Royal/UK Tour), The Stranger on the Bridge (Salisbury Playhouse/Tobacco Factory Theatres), Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth (both Guildford Shakespeare Company), A Girl Standing (Theatre503), Measure for Measure, Henry V (both Cambridge Arts Theatre). His translation of Sorry We Didn’t Die at Sea by Emanuele Aldrovandi will be staged for the first time at Seven Dials Playhouse in July 2022.

Tonya Walton is a Spanish – English translator and Actress, with a Joint Hons degree in Theatre Performance and Spanish (University of Chester). Based in Galicia, she originally moved to Spain in 2011 to work with Face 2 Face Theatre (Madrid). Since then, she has devised and performed in adaptations such as A Christmas Carol (Teatros El Alcazar y Figaro) Dracula (Teatro Infanta Isabel) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (Teatro Luchana) in association with Grupos SMedia.
Her most recent publication was a Complete Guide to the Region of Nigrán, that forms part of the Pilgrimage of Santiago. In 2019, she founded Show Time English – providing dynamic English learning for all ages, imparted through theatre and performance techniques. She is in the process of developing her first Children’s book and is studying Inter-lingual Respeaking with GALMA (University of Vigo). She is very much looking forward to collaborating with Foreign Affairs!

Veronika Haacker-Lukacs is a Budapest-born literary translator interested in contemporary
Hungarian literature and theatre. Her English translations of Iván Bächer’s feuilletons and
János Háy’s short stories have appeared in Hungarian Literature Online, Lunch Ticket and in
Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation. Her latest translations are The Deadman (2021), a play about the impossibility of returning once we’ve left, by acclaimed playwright, author and poet János Háy (forthcoming in Asymptote), and The Daughters of Nyíregyháza Street (2022), a troubled, dreamlike (at places nightmarish) play by Eszter Anna Szilágyi about Hungarian Gypsy prostitutes in Amsterdam’s red-light district (co-translated with poet and translator Simon Collings). Both have been commissioned by the International Theatre Institute Hungarian Centre. Veronika completed an MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, in 2019, and was a recipient of the Hungarian Petőfi Literary Fund’s Emerging Translators’ Grant in November 2020. She lives in Oxford and works as an Editor at Oxford University Press.