SCBWI FACES Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

 

 

 

 

SCBWI Faces goes behind the scenes to meet our volunteers. This month Anne Boyère chats to Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, feature writer for Words & Pictures.

 

Photograph of Ruth

 

Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp is a British literary translator working into English from Arabic, Russian and German. Her translation of The Raven’s Children by Yulia Yakovleva was awarded an IBBY Honour title, and her translations have been shortlisted for the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize and the GLLI Translated YA Prize. She has published over 30 translations including fiction, nonfiction and children’s books from Germany, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Russia, Switzerland, and Syria.

 

 

What do you write? 

 

I'm a literary translator: a lovely creative and very challenging form of writing, but where the original author has done the hardest part already! I am sent a finished text, often an already published book, with its crafted plot, rounded characters, distinct narrative voice, mood and atmosphere and my task is to turn all of that magic into English. My work often includes rendering humour and wordplay into completely new forms that work as well in a language that doesn't do the same things as the original language. I translate adult fiction and nonfiction, but often nothing is as thought-provoking and challenging as working on illustrated picture books or middle-grade novels with characters who speak only in rhyme!

 

Ruth with her latest translation

Do you have a ‘day job’ as well as volunteering and writing? 

 

As a freelancer, I have a sometimes have a confusing medley of part-time roles and projects, all linked to languages, education, publishing, and diversity in children's literature. My main income is from teaching languages and translating books, but I am also managing director of a non-profit organisation (World Kid Lit CIC) and slowly slowly setting up my own literary agency, Azulejos, where I'll be representing children's authors from the Middle East, Central Asia and other regions which are still very poorly represented in international publishing.

 

 

Describe your writing space. 

 

Besides being nerdily fascinated by linguistics and how languages work, I studied languages because I dreamt of a nomadic existence hopping from one medieval European city to another. And I first started translating books with the same dream of being a digital nomad, translating on my laptop by the beach, in the mountains, on trains crisscrossing the continent... Well, hopefully those adventures are still to come, but for now I mainly translate in my living room in Cheltenham. And whenever I can I take my editing outside in the garden and make the most of the fleeting sunshine.

 

 

How long have you been a SCBWI volunteer? 

 

Just over a year, when I took over the role of editing the Translation column from Julie Sullivan. Julie edited the column brilliantly for years and you can still find her articles here at Words & Pictures with the tag 'translation'.

 

 

Describe the main tasks of your role as a SCBWI volunteer.

 

 I curate four columns a year, covering interviews with children's book/YA translators and other professionals working on translations and international rights, as well as articles about the craft of translation and the practicalities of freelancing in international children's publishing. We have a very active, friendly email group for SCBWI Translator members, who are located all over the world, and I often ask there for contributions and ideas for the column. Or if I know a translator has a book coming out, I might approach them for an interview.

 

 

Do you do any other volunteering?

 

Yes, our roles at World Kid Lit CIC are still all as unpaid volunteers, although we are now applying for grant funding and about to launch a crowdfunding campaign so that we can start to run more paid projects and events, bringing world literature and diverse children's literature to schools and libraries in the UK and beyond. A few years ago I was on the board of the Translators' Association, part of the Society of Authors - another role I would highly recommend to any emerging literary translators who would like to learn more about how the UK publishing industry works from a translator's perspective. It's also a great opportunity for translators who, like me, would like to influence the industry to be more fair, more inclusive and more representative of our diverse writing community.

 

Ruth and Anam Zafar volunteering at NLT Inclusive Libraries Conference

What are the advantages of being a volunteer?

 

I have met so many publishing industry friends and colleagues through volunteering at the SoA, World Kid Lit and now SCBWI, and continually learn from them about our craft and our industry, but also about how charities and associations work, how to run projects effectively, how to chair a meeting or write minutes, and how to communicate ideas across complex teams. I was only employed in an office setting for five out of the twenty plus years of my career, and as a translator I could very easily not engage with other humans other than by email or in the margins of a manuscript. So I really value volunteering (and teaching, and running creative translation workshops in schools) as a way of staying connected with people who share the same passions as me and the same desire to promote reading and language learning, and to support inclusion and diversity.

 

 

Favourite children’s book?

 

Hmm, tricky! My favourite written in English is The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark by Jill Tomlinson. I still have my much treasured 1982 edition with illustrations by Joanne Cole (I think so anyway. They were terrible in the 1980s at thinking to #namethetranslator or #nametheillustrator). But my favourite translation is much harder - I'm constantly reading new translations and I'm constantly falling in love! One that absolutely everyone should read at any age, whether you have children or not, for its incredible humanity and endless surprises is The Murderer's Ape by Jakob Wegelius, translated by Peter Graves. It's one of the few books that everyone in our family has read and we all adored. It's astonishingly expansive and as someone with Portuguese Goan and Pashtun/Pakistani roots, I just loved that it opens in Lisbon and takes you across oceans to India and beyond. Not that it's really about those places. It's about a miscarriage of justice and so so much more.

 

*Header illustration: Tita Berredo and Ell Rose

*Other images courtesy of Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

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Anne Boyère is one of Words & Pictures' Feature Editors. You can find her on Instagram. She hosts #SCBWIchat, now on Threads @scbwi_british_isles. If you'd like to chat with her about your book, you can contact her anne.scbwi.bi@gmail.com

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Ell Rose is a non-binary illustrator & animator based in Edinburgh and Illustration Features Editor for Words & Pictures. Their cats sometimes feature in their work in either comics or illustrations/animation. They are available for editorial, non-fiction and fiction books and commercial work as well as 2D motion graphics.
Find their work at www.fourfooteleven.com. Contact illustrators@britishscbwi.org

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Tita Berredo is the Illustrator Coordinator of SCBWI British Isles and the Art Director of Words & Pictures.
Follow her on Instagram, X and www.titaberredo.com or contact her at illuscoordinator@britishscbwi.org