Originally from Ireland, Peter McCambridge holds a BA in modern languages from Cambridge University, England, and has lived in Quebec City since 2003. He runs Québec Reads and now QC Fiction, a new imprint of Quebec fiction in translation from Baraka Books that has been publishing since 2016. He was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Translation and the Giller Prize for Songs for the Cold of Heart, his translation of La fiancée américaine by Eric Dupont.
March 23, 2019
Are sales of translations at an all-time high? Are national newspapers spotlighting new books from Quebec and profiling the hottest Quebec talent more than ever? Are Christian Guay-Poliquin and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette household names outside of the province? The short answer is that, with column inches, shelf space, and readers’ attention spans all in short supply, I don’t believe that French-to-English translation is experiencing quite the surge in attention that some people might think, although numbers are frustratingly hard to come by.