Martin Aitken

“I was thinking about a whole load of names, the likes of Hamsun, Dostoevsky, Kafka...authors whose writing would be completely unfamiliar to us if it weren’t for the transformative, transcendental power of translation.” Martin Aitken—who has translated numerous Scandinavian authors including Helle Helle, Josefine Klougart, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Dorthe Nors—accepts the 2019 PEN Translation Prize for his translation from the Norwegian of Hanne Ørstavik’s novel Love (Archipelago Books, 2018).