Don Bartlett: Interview of a Translator (part 3)

Parts 1 and 2 of the interview with translater Don Bartlett, can be found here and here.

Jo Nesbø and Don Bartlett have been short-listed for the CWA International Dagger for The Redbreast (2007) and The Redeemer (2009).

EC: Which Scandinavian crime authors would you like to see published in English?

DB: I have always been a big fan of Dan Turell. A larger than life Danish writer who died in 1993 at the age of 47. He wrote ten crime stories with great style, wit and warmth.

EC: What are you working on now? (What do we crime fans have to look forward to and will you be doing the rest of the Gunnar Staalesen books as it was reported that Arcadia intend to publish all of them...)

DB: At present I am about to start the next Jo Nesbø, THE LEOPARD. Who knows what will happen with the other Staalesen books? Of course I hope the series will go from strength to strength.

EC: Do you like to read crime fiction (that you're not translating)? - And if so which authors do you enjoy?

DB: Yes, I like reading crime fiction, and there are plenty of good books around. Looking at my pile, I can see recent reads have been Ann Cleeves, Teresa Solana, George Pelecanos, John Harvey…

EC: If you could have written one book which would it be?

DB: One? Philip Kerr’s Berlin trilogy? Does that count? Don’t know. I don’t have dreams of that kind.

EC: Thank you so much for your time Don and also thanks to Crime Scraps for the accompanying photos.



I wrote up the "translators panel" that Don was on at CrimeFest along with Ann Cleeves, Tiina Nunnally, Roz Schwartz and Reg Keeland (aka Steven T Murray) and it's on the blog here.

You can now also listen to the discussion via an mp3 file. (Other panels are available on this CrimeFest page.)

You can read reviews of some of the books that Don's translated, via the Euro Crime website bibliography pages for: K O Dahl, Jo Nesbø and shortly, Gunnar Staalesen.

(NB. These bibliography pages will also help you read the books in their original publication order, (in so much as they are available) rather than translation order. This is rather important for Jo Nesbø's books.)