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Contributor

Margaret Jull Costa

Contributor

Margaret Jull Costa

United Kingdom

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for nearly thirty years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga, and Ramón del Valle-Inclán....

She received the 2008 PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Award, the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of Eça de Queiroz’s masterpiece The Maias, the 2012 Calouste Gulbenkian Prize for The Word Tree by Teolinda Gersão (Dedalus Books), and The 2015 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize in Translation for Diary of the Fall by Michel Laub.

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Articles by Margaret Jull Costa

The Pharmacist’s First Report

By Lúcio Cardoso

“One does not kill wolves with poison.”

Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa & Robin Patterson

A Mexican Story

By Alberto Barrera Tyszka

My friend Lencho Mejía has been murdered thirty-seven times in Los Angeles.

Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

Multilingual

Violence and Drug-Trafficking in Mexico

By Juan Villoro

In Mexico, people will pay up to $70,000 dollars for a license to hunt and kill a bighorn sheep. Killing a man is much cheaper.

Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

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A Surprising Tale in the Form of an Alphabet

By Bernardo Atxaga

My friends were beginning to worry: Was I writing too many alphabets?

Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

from “Scenes from the Silent Movies”

By Julio Llamazares

Balancing the World on His Chin The posters advertising movies or dances were not the only ones that occasionally clamored for our attention from Olleros’ walls and tree trunks. Sometimes, too,…

Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

The Woman Who Stole the Rain

By Teolinda Gersão

I smiled to myself when I saw just where I had ended up, thanks to this lack of efficiency, a lack which the manager appeared to attribute to the workings of fate or chance.

Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa