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Our research

Through the Research Group, BCLT acts as a hub for literary translation research within the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at UEA in Norwich, and beyond, engaging both academic staff and research postgraduates. We host a range of research events, from seminars and book‑launch symposia to major international conferences. In addition, we collaborate with research organisations across the UK and around the world on innovative projects, fostering dialogue, collaboration, creativity and new approaches in the field of literary translation.

News from PETRA-E’s 3rd International Conference: Creative Translation in the Age of AI

University of East Anglia, Norwich and ONLINE, 28–29 May 2026

This conference was organised by BCLT and PETRA-E, an international network of literary translation programmes. BCLT's Duncan Large is a founding member of the network and has served as its Chair since 2017.

Former PhD student James Hadley (now Director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation in Dublin) returned to UEA to give a plenary lecture on the Friday morning, and Cecilia Rossi (Executive Director of BCLT) spoke in the plenary round-table discussion on Friday afternoon.

The BCLT Literary Translation Research Group was well represented at the event. Papers were presented by MA Literary Translation alumna Heidi Clark, Kotryna Garanasvili, Eugenia Loffredo and PhD student Harriet Truscott, while Duncan Large and Philip Wilson chaired multiple sessions each. PhD students Astrid Alben, Claire Demenez and Jess Tipton presented posters in the poster session on Friday lunchtime.

Read UEA's press release

BCLT Research Group

The BCLT Research Group was founded in 1993 when Jean Boase‑Beier established UEA’s MA in Literary Translation, alongside Professors W.G. Sebald, Clive Scott, and Janet Garton. From the start, the group’s ethos has been to combine rigorous research with the practice of writing translations.

Today, the group includes Duncan Large, Cecilia Rossi, Thomas Boll, Jo Catling, Philip Wilson, Veronika Bowker, Eugenia Loffredo, Hannah Osborne, Alana Stone, John-Mark Philo, Pierre Faugère, Clodagh Kinsella, Timothy Anderson, Kotryna Garanasvili, Juana Adcock, Astrid Alben, Claire Demenez, Jess Tipton, Harriet Truscott and Laura Zambianchi.

Members of the Research Group lecture, write, and run workshops on a wide range of literary translation topics. They also oversee the PhD programme, which has produced around 70 graduates. Across research and translation, members have been recognised with numerous grants and awards, reflecting the group’s ongoing contribution to the field.

Find out more about our research group members and their work

BCLT is always happy to partner with other research projects and networks. We are a founding member of the PETRA-E Network and co-organise its annual European School of Literary Translation. Other recent collaborations include with the AHRC-funded projects Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature and the Feminist Translation Network.

BCLT has hosted seven International Postgraduate Translation Symposia, three of which have resulted in edited collections: Rebecca Hyde Parker and Karla Guadarrama Garcia (eds), Thinking Translation: Perspectives from Within and Without (Boca Raton: BrownWalker Press, 2008); Jean Boase-Beier, Antoinette Fawcett and Philip Wilson (eds), Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Duncan Large, Motoko Akashi, Wanda Józwikowska and Emily Rose (eds), Untranslatability: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 2019).

For many years BCLT published the journal of the UK Translators Association, In Other Words, the literary translation periodical Norwich Papers, and New Books in German.

Our Impact

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The Translator as Creative Writer

BCLT bridges academic research and the literary translation profession, turning insights into real-world impact. Working with the National Centre for Writing and other partners, we design activities that support translators’ professional development and advance the field.

As an academic research centre with a mission to support the literary translation profession, BCLT is in a unique position. Working in close partnership with the National Centre for Writing and other key impact partners, we take pride in capitalising on our academic research to benefit the wider community.

In particular, we draw on the insights from our research in designing our programme of activities that contribute to the continuing professional development of translators.

BCLT has been instrumental in transforming the role of the literary translator - from a linguistic technician to a creative writer publicly recognised by literary prizes such as the Booker International.

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Collaborative Translation Practices with Latin American Indigenous Languages

Prof Cecilia Rossi is currently working on an AHRC Impact Acceleration Account project entitled: "Literary Translation as a Creative Writing Practice in the context of Guaraní - Spanish to English translation" which facilitated the first ever Guaraní-Spanish into English translation workshop at the 2025 BCLT summer school.

The workshop was aimed at emerging translators from Latin American Spanish with an interest in exploring collaborative translation practices for the translation of indigenous languages. In April 2023 Prof Rossi chaired a panel discussion at the Literary Translation Centre of the London Book Fair which called for emerging translators from Spanish to explore collaborative translation practices with LA bilingual writers and/or writers from indigenous languages who self-translate into Spanish - recording available at On Translation, Bridges and Collaboration: Working with Latin American Indigenous Languages

The IAA project answers that call. The workshop worked on a selection of poems from Paraguayan poet Susy Delgado’s latest collection Tatatinangue which is a bilingual collection of poems published in 2023.

Read more about this project in Issue 6 of the BCLT Alumni Newsletter, featuring an interview with Iliana Franco Alvarenga, a participant in the 2026 Guaraní–Spanish workshop.

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Dialogues on Decolonisation

BCLT, together with colleagues across UEA, has been actively programming events and activities focused on decolonisation, both in the curriculum and in translation. You can explore some of our recent work through documents and films produced in this area.

Dialogues on Decolonisation 2021 details a series of conversations held in 2021, exploring questions such as the role of academic leadership in decolonising the curriculum, how Indigenous lives matter to academics, and whether culture itself can be decolonised.

The plenary sessions at the 2022 BCLT Summer School were programmed by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang, featuring speakers from the Tilted Axis anthology Violent Phenomena: Translation and its Discontents. The sessions examined what it means to decolonise literary translation and whether such an endeavour is possible, with contributors offering insights on how translation can be reimagined and reclaimed to challenge the power structures inherent in the literary world. Short talks and plenary sessions are available to watch on the BCLT YouTube channel.

Explore BCLT conferences

Research Opportunities at BCLT

Catch up on past research seminars

Explore our archives

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Visit our Library

The BCLT Library, housed within the British Centre for Literary Translation at UEA, is a resource available to literary translators, researchers, UEA staff and students and the general public. Almost all of the library’s collection is available for readers to explore. Within the BCLT Library are books written in a wide variety of languages, as well as books translated into English from various languages. The library also contains reference works for the practice of literary translation, translations of poetry collections, dual-language poetry texts, journals relevant to literary translation, anthologies of translated works and biographies of writers.

Visit the BCLT Library on Tuesdays, 10am — 4pm. Find us in the Lakshmi Holmström Room, AHB 1.19, on the first floor of the Arts and Humanities building.

Browse our library online

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The British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW)

The British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) is a collection of archives based at UEA that includes material from acclaimed contemporary authors and translators. BACW holds a Literary Translation Archive formed from the work of BCLT with additional deposits from former UEA staff, and papers from Anne Born, Anthony Vivis, David Bellos, Daniel Hahn, and John Fletcher. BACW also holds a collection of over 30 German translations of the work of 19th-century French poet Paul Verlaine donated by Magda Whitrow

Archive fellowships are available to apply for. Lily Meyer is a previous visiting fellow at BACW and during her fellowship, she researched the literary translation archives of David Bellos, Anne Born, and John Fletcher.

BACW holds the following collections in its archives: Literary Translation Archive; W.G. Sebald Audiovisual Archive; Daniel Hahn Archive; Sarah Maguire Archive ; Patricia Crampton Archive

Email archives@uea.ac.uk