NEWS
SPRING 2023: I’m excited to have been awarded a translation grant (Recherchestipendium für Berliner Übersetzerinnen und Übersetzer) by Berlin’s Senatsverwaltung für Kultur for my work on Lebanese author Hilal Chouman’s novel Sadness In My Heart.
Congratulations to the fifteen other awardees!
SUMMER 2022: I’m thrilled to be judging this year’s Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize with colleagues Charis Olszok, Becki Maddock and Susheila Nasta.
OCT 2021: For the next two months I will be in residency at Callie’s in Wedding, Berlin. It’s exciting to be in the company of so many artists, and a delight to have such a calm, beautiful space to translate in.
JULY 2021: This month I spoke to prose writer Haytham El-Wardany, playwright Liwaa Yazji, and Arabic-German translator Sandra Hetzl about Berlin as a centre for new Arabic literary writing, as part of Bila Hudood festival.
MAY 2021: I am excited to be a mentor for New Writing North’s Arabic Translation Mentoring Programme. For the rest of the year I will be working with UK-based Bahraini writer, poet and translator Ali Al-Jamri on his project to bring the richness of Bahraini poetry into English.
JAN 2021: I currently hold a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant to translate Haytham El-Wardany’s beautiful, dark short story collection Things That Can’t Be Fixed. The judges said: ‘Katharine Halls offers a nimble translation of Haytham El-Wardany’s unsettling, off-kilter stories. These eight stories leave the reader straddling fault lines in realities that at first glance had seemed mundane. At once absurd and menacing, El-Wardany’s stories deftly capture the sense of profound disorientation when unexpected shifts in life, both large and small, completely upend surroundings we have taken for granted. Halls’s taut and supple translation elegantly navigates the stories’ sly maneuvers.’ The book is not yet under contract and publishers are welcome to get in touch.
JAN 2021: I’ve just joined Shadow Heroes, a brilliant organisation based in the UK who use translation to get secondary school students thinking critically about the world. Shadow Heroes’ approach is proudly decolonial, intersectional and anti-racist. I am working with an amazing team of collaborators—who variously translate to and from Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, Punjabi, Spanish, and Turkish—on a series of workshops exploring race through translation that draws on languages and experiences from beyond Western Europe.
JAN 2021: This spring I am delighted to be a translation mentor for the Royal Court Theatre’s Young Agitators programme, which gives space and opportunity to young theatre curators and creatives who are interested in roles outside of performing.