Ros Schwartz is an award-winning translator from French.
Acclaimed for her new version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (published in 2010), she has over 100 fiction and nonfiction titles to her name. One of the team who has retranslated George Simenon’s novels for Penguin Classics. She has translated a number of Francophone writers including Tahar ben Jelloun, Fatou Diome and Ousmane Sembène and most recently Max Lobe’s A Long Way from Douala (HopeRoad) and Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? Her translation of Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots was published by Penguin Classics in October 2023. She has recently translated a manga version of Camus’ LEtranger to be published by Penguin Classics.
The French government made Ros a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009, and in 2017 she was awarded the John Sykes Memorial Prize for excellence by the Institute of Translation and Interpreting.
For the past two decades, Ros has been energetically involved in translator training. She gives masterclasses worldwide and is cofounder of a literary translation summer school, first held at Birkbeck in 2011, and later at City University and now at the University of Bristol.
Ros is dedicated to nurturing emerging translators and guiding them to become better writers. After two years as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Kings College London (2019–2021), assisting PhD students with their academic writing, she was an Advisory Fellow from 2021 to 2024.
Ros contributed a chapter to The Translator as Writer Continuum, (2007), and has published in professional journals such as In Other Words and Context.
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