Charlotte Coombe is an award-winning British translator working from Spanish, French and Catalan into English. 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 interest in women’s writing. She translates fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She has received various awards and short-listings for her translations.

Her translation of Abnousse Shalmani’s Khomeini, Sade and Me (2016) won a PEN Translates award and was her second title with World Editions. For Charco Press, she translated The President’s Room by Ricardo Romero (2017) and a collection of novellas and short stories by the Colombian author Margarita García Robayo, published as Fish Soup in 2018, and by the same author, Holiday Heart (2020), which was also awarded a PEN Translates grant. Her translation of Eduardo Berti’s novel The Imagined Land was published in 2018 by Deep Vellum Publishing. Her translation of the non-fiction title The Seaweed Revolution by Vincent Doumeizel was published in April 2023.

Her co-translation with Isabel Adey of the novel December Breeze by Colombian author Marvel Moreno was published by Europa Editions in November 2022, and has been shortlisted for the QSSI Translation Prize 2023.

She recently also received the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Literary Translation for the translation from Spanish of Antonio Díaz Oliva’s story, “Mrs. Gonçalves and the Lives of Others,” which featured in the spring issue of The Southern Review in 2022.

She has translated work by authors such as Marvel Moreno, Antonio Diaz Oliva, Orlando Echeverri Benedetti, Lucía Baskaran, Elizabeth Duval, Juan Villoro, Emma Deruschi, Rosa María Roffiel, Santiago Roncagliolo, Edgardo Nuñez Caballero, Jimena González and Aminata Aidara. Her translations have appeared in publications such as The Southern Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, and Latin American Literature Today.

In 2020, she co-founded the YouTube channel Translators Aloud, shining the spotlight on literary translators reading from their published work, or work seeking a publisher in English.

Her latest translation,  the novel Far by Rosa Ribas is published by Foundry Editions in 2024. She is currently co-translating Matar el nervi [Killing the Nerve] by Anna Pazos, from the Catalan, with Laura McGloughlin (also forthcoming from Foundry Editions in 2025).

As well as translating literature, working as CMC Translations, she provides transcreation, proofreading, editing and revising on a daily basis for various private clients and agencies.