A Talk with the Translator

One Community, One Book

Alison Watts, translator of What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, will join us for a live Zoom interview.

Alison Watts, the translator of What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, will be joining us via Zoom for a live interview from Australia. The interview will be streamed to the projector screen in the Laman Library Lecture Hall. If you have questions you would like to ask Alison, please submit them ahead of time here. For ages teen & up.

Alison Watts is an Australian freelance literary translator who lived for many years in Japan. She had a long career in commercial translation before turning to full-time literary translation in 2016. Her translations include What You Are Looking For is in the Library (2023) by Michiko Aoyama, The Boy and the Dog (2022) by Hase Seishu, The Aosawa Murders (2020) by Onda Riku, Spark (2019) by Matayoshi Naoki and Sweet Bean Paste (2017) by Durian Sukegawa.

In 2021 she was awarded the Kyoko Selden Memorial Prize for Translation, and in 2024 she won the inaugural Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize for her translation of Hase Seishu’s The Boy and the Dog.

She is also passionate about sashiko, which is a form of traditional Japanese stitching.

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