Helen Stevenson

Helen Stevenson lives in Somerset, where she teaches piano and translates French fiction into English. She studied modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford. She is also a novelist, with three novels and a memoir, Instructions for Visitors, to her name.

Her translation work has brought her the most visible recognition. In December 2023 she came across Vincent Delecroix's Naufrage while reading French press reviews at her kitchen table, and described it as writing she had needed to read for a long time. She took on the translation, noting she persisted after many publishers had passed on the manuscript. The finished translation, published by Hoperoad Publishing, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Small Boat is a slim, devastating novel set around the November 2021 Channel disaster in which 27 migrants drowned. Its narrator is the young French radio operator who took the desperate calls from the capsized dinghy and was later accused of negligence and inhumanity. Stevenson's translation was singled out by the Times Literary Supplement, the Literary Review, and the International Booker judges for giving the novel a direct, unsparing English voice that matches its moral urgency.

For a first read, Small Boat is the obvious starting point. At just 128 pages it reads in a sitting, but the questions it raises about complicity and bystander responsibility tend to linger. If you then want to see Stevenson in her own authorial voice, Instructions for Visitors is the next place to go.