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Contributor

Alison Anderson

Contributor

Alison Anderson

Alison Anderson worked as an English teacher in Switzerland, France, Greece, and Croatia before settling down as a consular agent and translator in the San Francisco Bay Area for a number of years, during which she published two novels, Hidden Latitudes and Darwin’s Wink. In 2008 she moved back to Europe and has since been working as a full-time literary translator. Her third novel, The Summer Guest, was published in 2016. She has translated over ninety novels from French, including Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog and works by Nobel laureate JMG Le Clézio. She is currently living in a village in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

Articles by Alison Anderson

A cobblestone street in Rwanda at sunset with a few pedestrians and motorcycle riders
Photo by Michael Muli on Unsplash
No Familiar Faces
By Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse
I had the look of a Westerner fresh off the boat, with my wrinkled trousers, tourist backpack, and it didn’t tally with my fluency in Kinyarwanda.
Translated from French by Alison Anderson
Two stacks of books
Diana Bell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Where Are the Women in Translation?
By Alison Anderson
Why aren’t more women getting into print in English, particularly when one bears in mind that the proportions are reversed when the gender of the translator is in question?
But Your Eyes
By Esther Nirina
Smooth is the beach / Like the arch of my entrance / Refusing your doors.
Translated from French by Alison Anderson
Double Fishing
By Mohamed Magani
If he and I had been able to exchange space and time, he might well have become “Trout Fishing in America.”
Translated from French by Alison Anderson
Is This How Women Grow Up?
By Leïla Marouane
When the massacres began in 1990 we had our doors bullet-proofed.
Translated from French by Alison Anderson
Multilingual