wikipedia | worldcat | academia |
Nicky Harman lives in the UK. She translates full-time from Chinese, focussing on contemporary fiction, literary non-fiction, and occasionally poetry, by a wide variety of authors. When not translating, she spends time promoting contemporary Chinese fiction to English-language readers. She works for Paper-Republic.org, a non-profit registered in the UK, where she is also a trustee. She writes blogs (for instance Asian Books Blog), give talks and lectures, and takes part in literary events and festivals, especially with the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. She also mentors new translators, teaches summer schools (Norwich, London, Warwick and Bristol), and judges translation competitions. She tweets, with Helen Wang, as the China Fiction Bookclub @cfbcuk.
She taught on the MSc in Translation at Imperial College until 2011 and was co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors) 2014-2017.
Winner of the 2020 Special Book Award of China; the 2015 Mao Tai Cup People's Literature Chinese-English translation prize; and of first prize in the 2013 China International Translation Contest, Chinese-to-English section, with Jia Pingwa’s "Backflow River", 倒流河
Forthcoming publications:
Diablo's Boys, A Novel (《男孩们》) Annabel Yang Hao, co-translated with Michael Day, Balestier, 2024
Fellow Feelings, Collected stories by Han Dong, co-translated with Megan Copeland and Jack Hargreaves, no publications details yet
2023 publications:
Shaanxi Opera, （《秦腔》）, Jia Pingwa, co-translated with Dylan Levi King, Amazon Crossing, 2023.
The Sojourn Teashop （《暂坐》）, Jia Pingwa, co-translated with Jun Liu, Sinoist Books, 2023
2022 publications:
Flight of the Bumblebee (《野蜂飞舞》）Huang Beijia, Balestier , 2023
Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning, (《早上九点叫醒我》）, A Yi, Oneworld
Literary Lectures (《文学课》) , by Bi Feiyu, Routledge
Dinner for Six (《六人晚餐》), co-translated with Helen Wang, Balestier
I Want to be Good (《我要做好孩子》) , Huang Beijia, New Classic Books
2021 publications:
More Than One Child: Memoirs of an Illegal Daughter, Shen Yang, Balestier
2020 publications:
Oriental Silk, by Zhu Xiaowen, Hatje Cantz (Germany)
2019 publications:
Broken Wings, By Jia Pingwa, ACA Publishing
2018 publications:
The Chilli Bean Paste Clan, by Yan Ge, Balestier Press (awarded a PEN Translates grant)
Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China, by Rao Pingru, Knopf Doubleday (awarded a PEN Translates grant)
2017 publications:
Jia Pingwa, Happy Dreams, Amazon Crossing, 2017.
Fish Tank Creatures, by Dorothy Tse, short story, translated with Natascha Bruce
2016 publications:
Crystal Wedding, novel by Xu Xiaobin, Balestier Press, 2016 (awarded a PEN Translates grant)
2015 publications:
Paper Tiger, essays by Xu Zhiyuan, co-translated with Michelle Deeter, Head of Zeus, 2015 (awarded a PEN Translates grant).
Sissy Zhong by Yan Ge, published READ PAPER REPUBLIC.
January:Bridges, by Dorothy Tse, published READ PAPER REPUBLIC. The translation and editing of this story is discussed and illustrated here: Free Word Centre.
Also, 2015-2016, READ PAPER REPUBLIC short story series: launching, planning, translating, editing, promotion and publicity.
2014 publications:
The Book of Sins by Chen Xiwo published by FortySix, October 2014.
White Horse, novella by Yan Ge, Hope Road Publishing, October 2014.
A Tabby-cat's Tale by Han Dong, winter 2014.
The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver by Chan Koon-chung, Doubleday, April 2014.
Snow and Shadow, short story collection by Dorothy Tse, East Slope Publishing, March 2014.
A New Development Model and China’s Future, by Deng Yingtao, Routledge, March, 2014.
The Stone Ox that Grazed, short story by Sun Yisheng in Asymptote, April 2014.
A Loud Noise, poems by Han Dong, March 2014.
Other Published Translations in date order:
Urban Control and the Modernist City - essay by Leung Man-Tao, in LA Review of Books, originally appeared in Paper Republic, August 2013.
Woman Fish, by Dorothy Tse, for the Guardian newspaper, March 2013
The Shades who Periscope through Flowers to the Sky, by Sun Yisheng, for Words Without Borders, December 2012, and Dad, Your Name is Bao Tian, by Sun Yisheng, for The World of Chinese, March 2013.
Old Man Xinjiang, by Xue Mo, in China Stories for the Guardian newspaper, April 2012.
The Man with the Knife by Chen Xiwo, for Words Without Borders, November 2012
'Goodbye to Anne', in the novella collection The Road of Others, by Anni Baobei, Makedo Publishing, 2012.
Throwing out the Baby, by Xu Zechen, in Words Without Border, April 2012.
Shi Cheng: Short Stories from Urban China, Comma Press "Tales from Ten Cities" series, the two by Han Dong and Ding Liying, 2012
Flowers of Nanjing by Yan Geling, , published by Chatto and Windus, January 2012
A Phone Call from Dalian: Selected Poems by Han Dong, published by Zephyr Press, April 2012. Multiple reviews including World Literature Today and Peony Moon
The Eye of the Eagle, short story by Bai Hua, published by Hope Road Publishing
Prize-winning novel Gold Mountain Blues/Jin Shan by Zhang Ling, published by Penguin Canada
Short stories for Ou Ning's Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, 2009, and literary magazine Chutzpah, 2010 and 2011.
Message from Unknown Chinese Mothers (Author: Xinran), Chatto & Windus, 2010.
China Witness (author: Xinran), oral history Co-translator with Esther Tyldesley and Julia Lovell. Chatto & Windus , 2008.
Banished! (author: Han Dong) (《扎根》 韩东), novel. University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. Won a PEN Translation Fund Award (2006) for this work. Longlisted for Man Asian Literary Prize, 2008.
‘Long Corridor, Short Song’ (author: Zi Ren, in To Pierce the Material Screen: An Anthology of 20th Century HK Literature, to be pub. Renditions, Hong Kong 2008); (《长廊的短调》 梓人) short story.
China Along the Yellow River (author: Prof. Cao Jinqing, pub. Routledge Curzon, December 2004); (《黄河边的中国》 曹锦清) sociology of rural China.
K – The Art of Love (author: Hong Ying, pub. Marion Boyars, 2002); (《K》 虹影) novel.
Research publications:
Li Hao: Translation of Contemporary Chinese Literature in the English-speaking World: An Interview with Nicky Harman, The AALITRA Review, No 4 (2012)
What's that got to do with anything? Coherence and the translation of relative clauses from Chinese. In Journal of Specialised Translation (www.jostrans.org) issue 13, January 2010
Foreign Culture, Foreign Style: a Translator’s View of Modern Chinese Fiction. In Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 14(1): 13-31. (2006).
Beyond Paper Dictionaries: Mining the Web for Technical Terminology in Chinese (available from http://isg.urv.es/cttt/cttt/research.html, or on request from NH).
Visiting Fellow at the Research Centre for Translation at Chinese University Hong Kong, April 2006. Visiting Scholar, Fudan University and Beijing University, China, 2008.
Nicky Harman translated for READ PAPER REPUBLIC, week 3, 2 July 2015, and READ PAPER REPUBLIC, week 10, 20 August 2015.
| One Night on the Wharf | by Han Dong | February 01, 2022 |
| View from a Window | by Han Dong | April 16, 2020 |
| Hide! Hide! Hide! | by Yan Geling | March 28, 2020 |
| Letter to My Mother | by Ou Ning | October 04, 2018 |
| Dad Your Name is Field-Keeper | by Sun Yisheng | February 04, 2017 |
| Gu Jieming – a Life | by Han Dong | June 09, 2016 |
| The Bathtub – Scene of a Struggle | by Han Dong | May 12, 2016 |
| Snow | by Xu Xiaobin tr. Natascha Bruce and Nicky Harman | March 24, 2016 |
| That Damned Thing She Said | by Fu Yuli | March 03, 2016 |
| Backflow River | by Jia Pingwa | February 25, 2016 |
| Apery | by Sun Yisheng | January 28, 2016 |
| The Cry of the Deer | by Han Dong | January 21, 2016 |
| Sissy Zhong | by Yan Ge | August 20, 2015 |
| January: Bridges | by Dorothy (Hiu Hung) Tse | July 02, 2015 |
| The Cry of the Deer | by Han Dong | Pathlight: New Chinese Writing |
| Mother Earth (excerpt) | by Chiu Zu-Yin | Books from Taiwan |
| Free! | by Wang Bang | Words Without Borders |
| Old Man Xinjiang | by Xue Mo | The Guardian |
The Paper Republic database exists for reference purposes only. We are not the publisher of these works, are not responsible for their contents, and cannot provide digital or paper copies.
By Nicky Harman, May 24, '17
I'm running a translation workshop at Baptist University in Hong Kong on Tuesday 20th June 2017. We'll be working on a short piece of text from Jia Pingwa's novel 《高兴》. The event is free but please register by Monday 5th June to receive the text. Contact: cpw@hkbu.edu.hk and put Translation Workshop in the subject line.
By Nicky Harman, March 27, '17
Literary Translation in Practice 26th - 30th June 2017, City University London
Are you a practising professional or a newcomer to the art of translation?
Develop your translation skills under the guidance of top professionals at a central London campus.
An immersion course in literary translation into English across genres - including selections from fiction. poetry, history, essays, journalism, travel and academic writing - taught by leading literary translators and senior academics, with plenty of opportunities for networking.
• Arabic - Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
• Chinese - Nicky Harman
• French - Trista Selous and Frank Wynne
• German - Shaun Whiteside
• Italian - Howard Curtis
•Japanese-Angus Turvill
• Polish - Antonia Lloyd-Jones
• Portuguese - Daniel Hahn
• Russian - Robert Chandler
• Spanish - Peter Bush
• Swedish - Kevin Halliwell
Evening programme (attendance free): French Translation Slam with Frank Wynne and Ros Schwartz; Keynote Lecture Who Dares Wins by Professor Gabriel Josipovici; Author/translator Daniel Hahn on Translation and Children's Books and a buffet supper at local gastro pub sponsored by Europe House with a talk by Paul Kaye, Europe House Languages Officer.
Full fee: £520. Bursaries available.
Directors Amanda Hopkinson (Visiting Professor in Literary Translation. City, University of London) and French literary translator Ros Schwartz
Please note: All translation is into English and English needs to be your language of habitual use. All evening and lunchtime events are free and attendance is voluntary.
The organisers reserve the right to cancel a workshop that does not recruit to the required minimum number of participants. Any applicants for these groups will be notified with a minimum six weeks' notice.
By Nicky Harman, February 16, '17
Many libraries stock both books and films – a good film can encourage people to read the book, and vice versa, and it can be very interesting to compare a book with its film, to identify the changes and to understand the reasons behind them. For this blog, I have selected five Chinese novels or novellas available in English translation, that have been turned into films for international audiences. The films are of books by Geling YAN, ZHANG Ling and JIA Pingwa, and I have been lucky enough to translate one book by each of them.
By Nicky Harman, February 15, '17
Everything you wanted to know about us and Chinese-to-English translation! "Spotlight on: Paper Republic: Interview discussing the importance of high quality translators" Our blog on the International Literature Showcase
By Nicky Harman, February 9, '17
Surrealist fiction, as exemplified by Franz Kafka and his Kafkaesque absurdities, feels like a very western phenomenon. But it is also a kind of story-telling that some excellent Chinese writers have taken to and given a style and a twist all of their own. Yesterday, I looked at the stories of Dorothy Tse, from Hong Kong. In my second blog on surreal story-tellers in China, I’m writing about Sun Yisheng, one of a small number of independent-minded young authors who have experimented with new styles and stories far removed from the literary realism pervasive in mainland China.
By Nicky Harman, February 8, '17
Surrealist fiction, as exemplified by Franz Kafka and his Kafkaesque absurdities, feels like a very western phenomenon. But it is also a kind of story-telling that some excellent Chinese writers have taken to and given a style and a twist all of their own. Blair Hurley has a nice definition in her writer’s blog: ‘The most chilling or ominous surreal stories are where everything seems normal — until it gradually becomes clear that something is wrong, something is inescapable out of your character’s control.’ In a two-part blog, today and tomorrow, I’ll look at Dorothy Tse and Sun Yisheng, two contemporary Chinese writers who manage that feeling of ‘wrong-ness’, that juxtaposition of the normal and the weird, to perfection. In other ways, however, they are very different from each other and from classic western surreal writing.
By Nicky Harman, January 26, '17
The 2016 Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation was presented last night to our very own Helen Wang for her translation of Cao Wenxuan's Bronze and Sunflower. Celebrations and congratulations! More news and reviews to follow.
By Nicky Harman, December 4, '16
As usual, we have assembled a list of book-length translations from Chinese into English over the year. Congratulations to all authors and translators! This year’s list is longer than ever, and several books have won international prizes. Your additions, comments, corrections to this list are welcome - please leave a comment below and we’ll update the list. This is our fifth annual list; previous lists are here: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015...........
By Nicky Harman, December 3, '16
In 2015 and 2016, Paper Republic were honourable runners-up. Asymptote won in 2015, Words without Borders in 2016. Anyone can nominate any group/collective/organization...so to put in your nominations, see below.
The London Book Fair and UK Publishers Association are seeking entries from non-UK organisations for The Literary Translation Initiative Award at the LBF International Excellence Awards. Closing date is 15 December 2016.
Organisations that have succeeded in raising the profile of literature in translation, promoting literary translators, and encouraging new translators and translated works should apply/be nominated.
Who is eligible? Any company or organisation operating outside the UK, whose scope of achievement is outside the UK.
This is a great opportunity to follow in some illustrious footsteps, to be recognised by your peers and get some good publicity for your company. The shortlist for the awards will be unveiled in February and the winner announced at a gala awards event on Tuesday 14 March, during LBF.
To enter or learn more about the awards go to www.londonbookfair.co.uk/awards
By Nicky Harman, November 20, '16
Remember that page squirreled away on the P R home page, called: FAQ for Translators?
Well, it's been updated here
Thanks to Dongmei for supplying some handy information on signing with a Chinese publisher.
By Nicky Harman, August 1, '16
August is Women in Translation Month – and we're recommending some excellent women writing in Chinese.
From June 2015 to June 2016, the Read Paper Republic team published a short story/essay/poem translated from Chinese, one a week for a year. For last year’s #WITmonth we published four pieces written by women and translated by women (nos 7-10). The rest of the time, we didn’t pay too much attention to the gender of the writer. So it’s cheering to see that over the entire year, of the 53 pieces we published, 22 were written by women. They are all available online – free to view. Thank you to all our authors and translators.
Also , in May 2016, we drew up a list for The Literary Hub, of
10 CHINESE WOMEN WHOSE WRITING SHOULD BE TRANSLATED: WRITING FROM MAINLAND CHINA, HONG KONG, AND TAIWAN. Read it here:
http://lithub.com/10-chinese-women-whose-writing-should-be-translated/
By Nicky Harman, June 25, '16
"Iron Girls to Leftover Women: What Next for Chinese Women?" is a blog I've just written for Foyles, a mega-bookshop in London (and elsewhere) with an impressive website including regular blogs. I approached them because I knew they'd ordered some copies of Xu Xiaobin (徐小斌)'s Crystal Wedding and I wanted to do some promotion for the book. But it's hard to interest the general reader in a (virtually) unknown author and book, so I decided to pick up on the piece Xu Xiaobin wrote recently for PEN Atlas, "A sea of red flags" and write about women. Xinran (薛欣然) has written a lot about Chinese women too, and was happy to be included...and so I ended up with two nice interviews. I have no idea if it will shift more books by both these authors off the shelves, but it felt like a worthwhile thing to do......
By Nicky Harman, May 25, '16
Paper Republic collective and friends put together this list for LitHub.com:
"Most readers nowadays, asked to name a contemporary Chinese writer, could manage at least one. But the odds are that it will be a man. Yet the near-invisibility of Chinese women writers internationally is entirely undeserved. They flourish on the literary scene at home and have done so since the beginning of the New Culture Movement in the early twentieth century. We are quite proud that this list (drawn up by the Paper-Republic.org collective and friends) ranges so widely. There’s something here for everyone, from travel literature to novels and short story collections, from fantasy and sci-fi to meditations on love and loneliness, with plenty of dark humor along the way. We have included works from all over the Chinese-writing world–mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (and one from USA too)."
By Nicky Harman, May 25, '16
Terrific article by Helen Wang and Paul Crook:
"The British Museum collection of Mao badges currently stands at about 350 pieces. It’s part of the UK’s national collection of badges from all over the world. Since the catalogue of Mao badges was published, every so often I receive emails from people who have their own Mao badge collections, often numbering in the hundreds or thousands. One such person is Clint Twist, who, with only a little encouragement a couple of years ago, set up what is probably the first English language website devoted to Mao badges — and tweets a Mao badge almost every day @clinttwist.
More recently, I discovered that one of the British Museum volunteers, Paul Crook, had been a teenage Mao badge dealer in Beijing in the 1960s! Paul — who was recently interviewed by the BBC for a segment on posters from the Mao era — kindly agreed to talk about that time, vividly confirming Dikötter’s statement that “badges were the most hotly traded pieces of private property during the first years of the Cultural Revolution, open to every form of capitalist speculation.”
By Nicky Harman, April 21, '16
Natascha Bruce talks about starting out as a Chinese-to-English translator: "....it actually never occurred to me to make the link between literature existing in translation, and there being real people out there creating those translations. I don’t know what I would have said I thought happened, if pushed? That once you have studied Chinese for one hundred years and can prove, for certain, that you know everything – will catch every single hidden reference to a Tang poem without missing a beat – there’s a special ceremony and you are given a laptop made of jade and a library of books, and told to go forth and be the person to make them accessible to the English-reading world, something mystical like that."
