Joan Sellent (Castellar del Vallès, 1948).

A translator and university lecturer, he obtained a degree in Catalan Philology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in 1983, after which he completed a Master's Degree in Literary Translation at the University of Manchester. He now teaches Literary Translation at the UAB.

From 1984 to 1995 he worked as a translator specialising in dubbing for television series and films. He has also translated into Catalan a great number of literary works by such authors as Paul Auster, Willa Cather, Charles Dickens, Noah Gordon, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Ring Lardner, Salman Rushdie, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain and H. G. Wells. Furthermore, he has made a major contribution with his translations from English of plays that have been performed in the leading theatres of Catalonia, including the Romea, the National Theatre, Teatre Lliure, Villarroel and the Teatre Grec. His translations of works by Shakespeare –including Hamlet, Richard II, Coriolanus, King Lear, Twelfth Night and As You Like It, which were compiled in 2016 in the volume Versiona a peu d'obra– are particularly notable, while those of other playwrights, for example Gareth Armstrong, Alan Bennett, Edward Bond, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Neil LaBute, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, are also outstanding.

In 2006 he was awarded the City of Barcelona Catalan Language Translation Prize for his version of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge (Panorama des del pont) and, in 2008, he received the Theatre Critics of Barcelona Prize (2007 – 2008) for his translation of Shakespeare's King Lear (El rei Lear).

He is an honorary member of the Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (AELC – Association of Catalan Language Writers).



Web page: Toni Terrades for AELC.
Documentation: Toni Terrades.
Photographs: © Carme Esteve / AELC.
Translation: Julie Wark.