Imogen Taylor

Imogen Taylor studied French and German at New College, Oxford and at the Humboldt University, Berlin where she wrote a PhD thesis on bilingual couples in the eighteenth-century French novel. She has been working as a literary translator since 2014.

What brought you to Berlin? Love? World politics? Or was it a coincidence?

Escapism.

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What do you love about Berlin?

Nightingales singing on four-lane roads.

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What do you miss in Berlin?

Hills.

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What is your favorite spot in Berlin?

The corner of Kollwitzstraße and Belforter Straße. Not because of its current gentrified state, but because I like to remember that I once saw camels there, when there were still bits of wasteland in Prenzlauer Berg.

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Would you say you are a different person in Berlin? A different translator? And if yes, in what way?

I think I'm essentially the same person I was as a four-year-old in London, so no. But it's nice to be a translator somewhere where there are so many other translators; translating is probably a lot less lonely in Berlin than elsewhere.

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Which existing literary work do you wish you had written?

You can't write other people's books - or is that what translators do?

2024/25 Visiting lectureship at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf (DÜF)

2024 Glorious People shortlisted for the Schlegel Tieck Prize

2024 Austrian Cultural Forum Translation Prize

2023 German-English Viceversa Translation Workshop at Cove Park, Scotland

2023 Grant from the DÜF for work on Gabriele Reuter’s Ellen von der Weiden

2021  Translation of Sasha Marianna Salzmann's Beside Myself shortlisted for Helen and Kurt Wolff's Translator Prize

2021 Beside Myself longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award

2020  Translation of Sasha Marianna Salzmann's Beside Myself shortlisted for Schlegel-Tieck Prize

2017 The Scholl Case shortlisted for the Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction

2016  Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation