Aya Dela Cruz participates in BCLT Literary Translation Summer School

Cassandra “Aya” Dela Cruz, an alumna of the 2022 Filipino KFL Teacher Training Program, took part in the Literary Translation and Creative Writing Summer School of the University of East Anglia British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) held from 23 to 29 July 2023. She applied for the program with a sample translation of Kim Ho-yeon’s “Inconvenient Convenience Store (불편한 편의점).” The summer school was sponsored by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea). Aya previously completed the advanced course in media translation under LTI Korea’s 4th Translation Academy.

A total of 12 participants comprised the BCLT’s Korean workshop group. While the summer school is open to emerging translators, the cohort was mostly composed of experienced Korean-to-English literary translators. The workshop was led by Anton Hur, translator of Bora Chung’s “Cursed Bunny,” which was shortlisted for 2022 Booker International Prize for Translated Fiction, and Kyung-Sook Shin’s “I Went To See My Father.” Aside from taking part in the translation workshop, she also attended creative writing workshops and seminars on various other topics, such as collaborative translation and pitching book proposals.

Aya shared that she now plans to work on translating a full-length novel under a mentorship program while pursuing her graduate studies at Korea University beginning in September 2023 as a recipient of a Global Korea Scholarship grant.