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Contributor

Margaret Jull Costa

Contributor

Margaret Jull Costa

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.

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
LearnMultilingual
A Surprising Tale in the Form of an Alphabet
By Bernardo Atxaga
They say that the monks of eight or nine hundred centuries ago often had to face unenthusiastic, occasionally hostile audiences, who were most reluctant to follow the steps of a theological proof or of…
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 go to Lisbon on business fairly regularly. I get on a plane to go there, if not every month, then at least every six weeks or so. I understand the language well enough not to need an interpreter, having…
Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa