The Imagined Land - Berti, Eduardo

Eduardo Berti was born in Buenos Aires in 1964. He was admitted to the prestigious and influential Oulipo in 2014, becoming the group’s first Argentinian writer. His first work of fiction, Los pájaros was praised by the critics and won a Grant-Award from Cultura Magazine. This was followed by two major novels: Agua and La mujer de Wakefield,. The former was translated into French, English and Portuguese, the latter was translated in Japan and France, where it was a finalist in the prestigious Prix Femina for Best Foreign Book. In 1998, Berti moved to Paris where he worked as a cultural journalist, a correspondent for different media outlets and a scriptwriter, and taught courses in writing. In 2002, he published La vida imposible, whose translation into French received the Libralire-Fernando Aguirre Prize. Two years later he published Todos los Funes, with which he won the prestigious Premio Herralde. Hailed as one of the books of the year by the Times Literary Supplement, the work was translated into Korean and French. Berti is also an accomplished translator of authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gustave Flaubert, and Elizabeth Bowen. In 2011 he won the Emecé Prize and the Las Américas Prize for the Novel with his book Imagined Country. He currently lives in Bordeaux.


Charlotte Coombe is a British translator based in the UK, working from French and Spanish into English. Her translation of Abnousse Shalmani’s Khomeini, Sade and Me (2016) won a PEN Translates award in 2015. After a decade translating creative texts in gastronomy, the arts, travel and tourism, lifestyle, fashion and advertising, her love of literature drew her to literary translation, with a particular focus on women’s writing. Her work has been published by Phaidon, World Editions and online by Palabras Errantes As well as translating literature, she owns the translation agency CMC Translations providing transcreation, proofreading, editing and revising on a daily basis for various private clients and agencies.