Juana Adcock

Monterrey, México, 1982.

Juana is the author of :


Juana is a Mexican poet, translator and editor based in Scotland and working in English and Spanish. Her poems and translations have appeared in publications such as Magma Poetry, Shearsman, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote and Words Without Borders. Her first book, Manca, explores the anatomy of violence in Mexico and was named by Reforma‘s distinguished critic Sergio González Rodríguez as one of the best poetry books published in 2014, and is published in English by Argonáutica.


Her English-language debut poetry collection, Split, published in 2019 by Blue Diode Press, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was included in the Guardian’s Best Poetry of 2019. Her most recent poetry publication, Vestigial (Stewed Rhubarb Press, 2022), was commissioned by the Alasdair Gray Archive. She has performed at numerous literary festivals internationally.

She is co-editor and translator of Temporary Archives: Poetry by Women of Latin America (Arc Publications, 2022). Her translation of Hubert Matiúwàa's indigenous-language poetry collection The Dogs Dreamt (flipped eye, forthcoming 2023) received a PEN Translates award, and her translation of Laura Wittner's Translation of the Route is due for publication in 2024 by the Poetry Translation Centre.

She has also translated a collection of essays by Gabriela Wiener for Restless Books and has translated work by a number of British poets into Spanish, including Helen Mort, Andrew Motion, Kei Miller and Sam Riviere, and authors such as Elena Poniatowska, Diego Enrique Osorno, Juan Rulfo and David Huerta into English.

Juana's most recent work for MTO Press includes translations of the stories 'Rotten Gold' and 'Area 51' by Lola Ancira and an in-progress translation of Lola'a book The Sadness of Shadows.

Jen Calleja

Shoreham-by-Sea, UK, 1986.

Jen is the author of :


She is a poet, short story writer and essayist who has been widely published, including in The White Review, The London Magazine, and Best British Short Stories (Salt). She was awarded an Authors’ Foundation Grant from
the Society of Authors to work on her debut novel Vehicle, and was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize for an excerpt from the book. She was also longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Experimentation in Text.

She has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize as a literary translator from German into English and was the inaugural Translator in Residence at the British Library. She is also a founding editor of Praspar Press, a micro-publisher of Maltese literature in English translation.

Jen also played and toured in the DIY punk bands Sauna Youth, Feature, Monotony, Gold Foil and Mind Jail spanning a period of over a decade as both a drummer and a vocalist.

For MTO, Jen is translating Helene Bukowski's second novel The Warrior, while we release a UK/European edition of her translation of Helene's first novel Milk Teeth.

Photograph by Sophie Davidson.

Heather Cleary

Heather is a translator and writer based in New York and Mexico City. Her writing has appeared in Two Lines, Lit Hub, and Words Without Borders, among other publications; her book, The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction, which shows how narratives of translation can challenge norms of intellectual property and propriety, was published by Bloomsbury. She also co-edited McSweeney’s 65: Plundered with Valeria Luiselli.

Her translations include Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime (winner, English PEN Award), Brenda Lozano’s Witches, Betina González’s American Delirium, Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre (nominee, National Book Award), Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets (finalist, Best Translated Book Award) and The Dark (nominee, ALTA’s National Translation Award), and Poems to Read on a Streetcar, a selection of Girondo’s poetry published by New Directions (recipient, PEN and Programa SUR translation grants).

She has served on the jury of the National Book Award in Translation, the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, and the PEN Translation Award, and is known to jump at the chance to speak about contemporary Latin American literature and/or translation. A founding editor of the digital, multi-lingual Buenos Aires Review and founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translation collective, she holds an MA in Comparative Literature from NYU and a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Sian Creely

Sian (Salford, 1994) is a writer, researcher and Spanish-English translator. She received her BA in European Social and Political Studies, in 2016, and an MPhil in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge, in 2018. Since then, she has worked at the United Nations in communications and as a researcher. She is interested in the effects of translation on gender, democracy and masculinities, and has written extensively on anti-gender movements and the far right, Pentecostal Christianity and contemporary art. She has translated plays, poems and short stories for anthologies and online publications. She was selected for the UNESCO Cities of Literature translation programme in Ljubljana in 2023. Curling is her first book-length translation.

Christina MacSweeney

Rotheram, UK.

Christina is the translator of (among other books):


She has an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. Her work has been recognised by a number or organisation and through a number of important awards. Her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize and was also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award (2017). Her most recent translations include fiction and nonfiction works by Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Jazmina Barrera, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published translations, articles and interviews on a variety of platforms.

Ayça Türkoğlu

Ayça is the translator of:


She received her BA in European and Middle Eastern Languages from the University of Oxford in 2013, before graduating with a master’s degree in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia in 2015. Since 2015, she has worked full-time as a freelance translator, translating everything from books, short stories, and magazine articles to fashion catalogues. She has been longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and shortlisted for the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, both in 2022.

Kate Webster

Kate is the translator of:

She is a professional freelance translator with extensive linguistic training and seven years’ professional experience in the academic research and education sector. Kate translates from Polish into English, specialising in literature, the arts and academia. She has worked on an increasingly varied range of projects, from proofreading academic articles on the topography of the Tatra mountains to translating children's books, and even subtitling a Polish crime series for British TV.

She has translated many short stories and essays for publication in anthologies and online and, in September 2018, took part in the Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme organised by the National Centre for Writing, where she was mentored by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Her first book-length translation was a translation from the Polish of Mapa by Barbara Sadurska, published by Terra Librorum in 2022. Her translation was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2023.

Białe noce (published as White Nights), by Urszula Honek, is her second book-length translation.