World Kid Lit blog, the @worldkidlit social media accounts, and the #WorldKidLitMonth (September) campaign are run by an informal collective of volunteers.
You can email us at worldkidlit@gmail.com, get in touch via social media (Twitter, Instagram, our Facebook page or the World Kid Lit Facebook discussion group), or contact one of us directly. We’ll try to help however we can, and we’re always grateful for offers of help with this volunteer-run project!
World Kid Lit Social Media Team
Claire Storey ~ co-editor of World Kid Lit blog
Claire is a literary translator working from German and Spanish into English. In 2021, she was given funding from Arts Council England for project focusing on Young Adult Literature from Latin America. Claire regularly volunteers in schools talking about careers with languages. www.clairestoreylanguages.co.uk
Jackie Friedman Mighdoll ~ co-editor of World Kid Lit blog
Jackie writes for children: poetry, picture books, and middle grade. She translates from Japanese to English. In a prior career, she founded a school for teaching world languages to children from newborn to elementary. She loves to explore the world through travel, language, and dessert! On the web at www.jackiefm.com/ On Twitter:@jackiefm
Johanna McCalmont # Co-editor of World Kid Lit Blog
Johanna was born in Northern Ireland and now lives in Brussels, Belgium where she works from French, German, Dutch and Italian. Her translations have been published by the New Books in German Emerging Translators programme and No Man’s Land. She loves connecting writers with audiences when interpreting at literary festivals and has a particular interest in African literature. www.johannamccalmont.com
Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp ~ social media; schools and libraries outreach; organisational development
Ruth is a literary translator, who translates fiction and non-fiction from Russian, German and Arabic. She has translated children’s books from Germany, Morocco, Palestine, Russia, Switzerland and Syria. Ruth is also co-editor of Russian Kid Lit blog and ArabKidLitNow.
Mohini Gupta ~ World Kid Lit LIVE; social media
Mohini is a writer/translator based in New Delhi. She has been a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow in 2017, and a Sangam House translator-in-residence in 2015. Her translations have been published by Tulika Publishers. She runs the digital Indian language poetry collective for young readers, Mother Tongue Twisters.
M. Lynx Qualey ~ World Kid Lit LIVE; social media
M. Lynx Qualey is founding editor of the translation-community website ArabLit, which won a 2017 London Book Fair prize. The project has since expanded to ArabKidLitNow!, the ArabLit Story Prize, and the ArabLit Quarterly magazine. MLQ is also co-host of the popular BULAQ podcast, and she writes regularly for a variety of publications.
Helen Wang ~ World Kid Lit Twitter
Helen translates contemporary Chinese literature, including novels, picture books and graphic novels for children and young adults. In 2017 she won the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation and a Chen Bochui Special Award. She works collaboratively with the China Fiction Book Club, Paper Republic, and the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. In 2016, she co-founded Chinese Books for Young Readers.
Anam Zafar ~ World Kid Lit Facebook Admin
Anam Zafar is a UK-based literary translator (Arabic and French to English). She won the 2021 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the inaugural Stinging Fly New Translator’s Bursary, and was longlisted for the 2021 John Dryden Translation Competition. Her translations have been published by ArabLit Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and The Stinging Fly among others. She also runs translation workshops for young people. www.anamzafar.com | Twitter: @anam_translates
World Kid Lit blog regular contributors
Titas Bose is a PhD student at University of Chicago, working on post-independent Indian children’s fiction in Bengali, Hindi and Marathi. She has worked as an English teacher in Cambridge School, Sriniwaspuri, New Delhi. As a part of an organisation called Sayambharataa, she helps organise workshops for tribal children in a Birbhum district of West Bengal. She is also the editor of the Delek Archives, the research wing of the Delek Education Foundation.
(Photo: Virginia Monteforte-Reljic)
Alexandra Büchler is director of Literature Across Frontiers, editor and translator of prose, poetry and non-fiction with thirty publications to her name. She has edited six anthologies of short fiction in translation and was series editor of Arc Publications‘ bilingual poetry anthologies New Voices from Europe and Beyond 2006-2016.
Lisa Davis is a freelance children’s book editor and publishing consultant. She helped set up and run BookTrust’s In Other Words programme, which supported UK publishers in acquiring children’s books in translation. She now works with authors and publishers around the world, and particularly enjoys hearing from publishers and agencies who need editorial support with their sample translations, including English language adaptations of rhyming picture books.
Christian Elongué is an author and researcher. Dismayed by a lack of black characters in books available to African children, Elongué founded munakalati.org in 2017 with the goal of building international recognition for African children’s book authors and increasing access to African children books. In 2019, he authored An Introduction to Children’s Literature in Cameroon, the first ever survey of the children’s book industry in Cameroon. Prior to that, he worked with the French National Centre for Children’s Literature. As a founding member of International Board of Books for Young People (IBBY-Cameroon), he has also spent several years developing literacy and educational initiatives as a means of empowering children in West Africa.
Megan Farr is Marketing and Publicity Manager at Firefly Press and currently researching into ‘Strategic Action for Internationalisation of the Children’s Publishing Sector in Wales’, as part of a creative industries PhD at the Mercator Centre at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David funded by the KESS II European Social Fund and sponsored by the Books Council of Wales.
Avery Fischer Udagawa serves as Translator Coordinator for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (see Translation in SCBWI). Avery’s translations from Japanese to English include the middle grade novels J-Boys: Kazuo’s World, Tokyo, 1965 by Shogo Oketani and Temple Alley Summer by Sachiko Kashiwaba. Her short story translations have appeared in Kyoto Journal, Words Without Borders, Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories, and A Tapestry of Colours 1: Stories from Asia. She lives near Bangkok.
Paula Holmes has served in a variety of volunteer capacities for the Association for Library Service to Children (a division of the American Library Association) including Fiscal Officer and is currently the Committee Chair for ALSC 2022 Nominating and Leadership Development. She is currently taking ballet to improve her interpretative dancing, creating tiny collage art, reading translations of children’s literature, and attempting to learn Finnish.
Lori is a US-based mother of two girls (4 years old, and 2 years old), a wife, a special education teacher in a public school, and a picture book lover. While homebound because of Covid-19, she decided to give her girls a taste of all the things this big wide world has to offer, to broaden their hearts and minds using her favorite thing…picture books! Since March they have been on a world tour using picture books. This year her 4th grade students are also involved, and are loving listening to all the wonderful stories she has found. You can find her on Instagram at @kidsreadtheworld, at kidsreadtheworld@gmail.com and on her blog at Kids Read the World.
Award-winning opera singer Nanette McGuinness is the translator of over 50 books and graphic novels for children and adults from French, Italian, and German into English, including the well-known Geronimo Stilton Graphic Novels. Two of her latest translations, Luisa: Now and Then (Humanoids, 2018) and California Dreamin’: Cass Elliot Before the Mamas & the Papas (First Second, 2017) were chosen for YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens; Luisa: Now and Then was also a 2019 Stonewall Honor Book.
Josephine Murray translates French to English and is studying for an MA in Literary Translation at UEA. She has a BA in English Literature and French, a PGDip and MA in Print Journalism and a PGCE. After working in journalism and PR for ten years she taught French, German and Spanish in schools in Gloucestershire, UK. She is now a writer and journalist and teaches children’s classes in creative writing and journalism. She is Chair of CIOL Gloucestershire Network. @MsJHMurray
Ayò Oyeku is a Nigerian children’s writer. His titles include The Legend of Atajoa and Queen Moremi Makes a Promise. In 2018, he founded Eleventh House Publishing with the aim of working with new writers who have something unconventional to say, rebels as it were.
Mariana Ruiz is a Bolivian children‘s author who publishes articles about comics, art books and YA literature on Geekdad.com. She works closely with the Bolivian Academy of Children‘s literature and is constantly on the lookout for diversity in books.
Lawrence Schimel is a bilingual (Spanish/English) writer and translator based in Madrid, Spain. He’s published over 120 books as author or anthologist, for readers of all ages. His books have won the Crystal Kite from SCBWI, a White Raven from the International Youth Library in Munich, and have twice been chosen by IBBY for Outstanding Books for Young People with Disabilities, and his translations have won the GLIL Best Translated YA Honor Title and a PEN Translates Award from English PEN, among other honors.
Mia Spangenberg translates a variety of fiction, nonfiction and children‘s literature from Finnish and German into English. Her work has been published in Finland and the UK and in journals such as LitHub and Asymptote. She is particularly passionate about children’s literature and is a regular contributor to World Kid Lit blog. She has a Ph.D. in Scandinavian studies from the University of Washington, Seattle where she resides with her family.
Dai Varela is an author from Mindelo, on the island of São Vicente, Cabo Verde. He published his first children’s book in 2013 and Dai received an Honorable Mention in the Trofa Lusophony Competition, an initiative supported by Camões, I.P. designed to promote children’s literature from Portuguese-speaking countries. That same year, he received public recognition by the Ministry of Culture for “valuable work for the dissemination of Cabo Verdean culture”. Read more about his work on his website.
Georgia Wall is a translator working from Italian to English. Previous jobs as a nursery assistant, language tutor and children’s bookseller helped spark her enthusiasm for children’s and YA literature. She was awarded a National Centre for Writing Emerging Translator Mentorship for Italian (2020/2021) and has a PhD in Italian Studies (2018, Warwick). Twitter: @cascettara
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