Daniel Hahn

Daniel Hahn, born in 1973, is a British writer, editor and translator working from Portuguese, Spanish and French. His translating career started by accident when a publisher asked him to take on a book by the Angolan novelist José Eduardo Agualusa. That first translation, The Book of Chameleons, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007, and he has translated professionally ever since.

His range is wide. As a translator he has brought work into English from Brazil, Angola, Portugal, Spain and France, with writers including Paulo Scott, José Luís Peixoto, Agualusa, Roger Mello, José Saramago, María Dueñas and Philippe Claudel. As a writer and editor, his non-fiction spans The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, The Tower Menagerie and Catching Fire: A Translation Diary, and he co-edited a reading guide for young readers whose first volume won the Blue Peter Book Award.

The recognition has been substantial. His translation of A General Theory of Oblivion won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2017; he donated half his winnings to establish the TA First Translation Prize for debut literary translators. He was appointed OBE in the 2020 Birthday Honours, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature the same year, and received the 2023 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. Three of his translations have been longlisted for the International Booker Prize.

For a reader arriving via Phenotypes, that novel is a strong place to start. Paulo Scott's story of two brothers in a black, upper-middle-class family takes on the myth of national racial harmony in Brazil, and Hahn's rendering keeps the specific Portuguese terms that give the book its force. If colourism and Brazilian identity pull you in, Agualusa's A General Theory of Oblivion, also translated by Hahn, is the natural next read.