The W.G.Sebald Lecture 2023: Alberto Manguel

This event took place on 23 March 2023. The information below is correct as of the publication date.
This year’s W.G. Sebald Lecture on literary translation is given by Alberto Manguel, the Argentinian-born, Canadian writer, translator and editor and acclaimed author of The Library at Night and A History of Reading.
His lecture Notes on the Art of Translation, explores Manguel’s thoughts on translation as a form of reading, of writing and of thinking. The translator is the secret sharer in the creation of a text, providing the original with what Borges called ‘a draft in another language’. Translation allows a text to come of age, generation after generation, and to enter a culture different from that of the original creator.
The Sebald Lecture 2023 is presented by the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT), in association with the National Centre for Writing and the British Library.
The Sebald Lecture is given annually on an aspect of literature in translation and is named after W.G. Sebald who set up BCLT in 1989. ‘Max’ was a German writer who opted to live in the UK and continue writing in German. His novels and essays include The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz and On the Natural History of Destruction, and they established him as a leading writer of the 20th century.
Alberto Manguel has written over 20 works of criticism including The Library at Night and A History of Reading and edited more than 30 literary anthologies. He is the author of six novels, including News from a Foreign Country Came, which won the McKitterick Prize. He has translated works by Amin Maalouf, Anna Seghers, Philippe Sollers and Marguerite Yourcenar into English, Katherine Mansfield and Arnold Wesker into Spanish. A Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) and Officer of the Order of Canada, he has also been awarded the Formentor Prize, the Gutenberg Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. From 2016-2018 he was Director of the National Library in his native Argentina, following in the footsteps of Borges, and he is now Director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Reading in Lisbon.