The LTAC is overjoyed to present our very first mentorship pair for the Karin Montin LTAC/QWF Mentorship in Literary Translation: mentor Jessica Moore and mentee Alex Boos.
Jessica Moore is an author and literary translator. Her first book, Everything, now (Brick Books 2012), is a love letter to the dead and a conversation with her translation of Turkana Boy (Talonbooks 2012) by Jean-François Beauchemin, for which she won a PEN America Translation award. Mend the Living, her translation of the novel by Maylis de Kerangal, was nominated for the 2016 International Man Booker and won the UK’s Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. Jessica’s most recent book—The Whole Singing Ocean (Nightwood 2020)—is a true story blending long poem, investigation, sailor slang and ecological grief, and was longlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Raymond Souster Award. She lives in Toronto.
Alex Boos graduated from Concordia University with a master of arts in Translation Studies and holds a Combined Honours degree in Contemporary Studies and French from the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University. He is a translator and researcher, and co-hosts The Poplar Tapes, a podcast on history, culture, and politics striving after anti-capitalist futures in the settler colonies.
The QWF Writing Mentorships and the #KarinMontin LTAC/QWF Mentorship in #LiteraryTranslation are designed to help promising emerging writers and translators make the transition to the next stage of their careers. Both mentors and mentees are selected by an independent jury.
The translation mentorship will alternate every other year between French to English translations and English to French. The LTAC is delighted and humbled to be able to offer this mentorship program with the help of our wonderful partners at the QWF.