Katy Derbyshire was born in London in 1973. After studying German at Birmingham University, she earned a Diploma in Translation from the University of London. In 1996, she moved to Berlin. She works as a freelance translator of contemporary German literature and writes a blog called lovegermanbooks. That's an imperative.
On your nightstand now:
All About Love by Lisa Appignanesi, which does what it says on the tin and I've been dipping into for about a year; Is that a Fish in your Ear by David Bellos, a very thought-provoking, iconoclastic look at translation that I treat myself to in small chunks; The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, although that's accompanying me everywhere I go too because I'm hooked; and the German writer Benjamin Stein's new novel, Replay.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Probably Diana Wynne Jones's Charmed Life. I remember painstakingly relating the rather complicated plot to my mother, and now I've just re-read it with my daughter. Lots of magic, brilliant characters and what turns out now to be excellent, quite challenging language.
Your top five authors:
At the moment: Inka Parei, Clemens Meyer, Selim Özdogan, Olga Grjasnowa and Jan Brandt. They're all German, and I've translated at least extracts from all their work. But it varies from week to week.
Book you've faked reading:
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. I watched the miniseries.
Book you're an evangelist for:
At the moment, Jan Brandt's Gegen die Welt. It's 927 pages of a North German youth in the 1980s, including lists of products sold at the drugstore, heavy metal reminiscences, experiments with fading type and parallel narration, alien abduction, Jeopardy! as a metaphor, neo-Nazis, bullying.... Actually I'm a terrible book evangelist, there's always at least one German book I'm crazy about and convinced it absolutely has to be translated. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. It has cakes and a quote from Gwyneth Paltrow. What more can you ask?
Book that changed your life:
The first German book I loved so much I wanted to share it with the English-speaking world was Selim Özdogan's Die Tochter des Schmieds, a really warm portrait of a girl growing up in 1950s Turkey. And so I translated various parts of it and put together a dossier and sent it out to publishers and--not surprisingly really--nobody wanted to commission an inexperienced translator they'd never heard of to work on a book they'd never heard of. But maybe one day. Anyway, that made me realize what I really wanted to do was translate literature.
Favorite line from a book:
A man in a bar, a woman tries to pick him up and he ignores her approaches until she suddenly blushes. And then comes the gut punch: "Sometimes I think, and sometimes I know, that all she did was give a stupid grin, that moment next to me, her head leaning forward into the red light of the lamp above the bar." From Clemens Meyer, All the Lights. So cynical and whimsical at the same time, and so simply put. And it's on this one moment that the whole ending of the short story pivots. Spine-tingling genius.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter. Because then I'd be instantly 15 again. I must have read it a dozen times--I was so overjoyed by her adult portrayal of a teenage girl. It was almost like all those Francis Hodgson Burnett children's tales of spoilt brats who turn good under tough circumstances, only deliciously naughty.