Translation Retreat 2026

Retreat Fellow · Translation Fellowship Stipend Recipient

Jack Hargreaves is a translator of Yorkshire extraction. His literary work, recognised by English PEN, has appeared on adda, Arts of the Working Class, Asymptote Journal, Granta, Samovar, The Southern Review and elsewhere. His full-length non-fiction publications include co-translations, with Yan Yan, of Winter Pasture by Li Juan and Seeing by Chai Jing (Astra House, 2021 and 2023, respectively), as well as I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan (Allen Lane/Astra House, 2025). From non-fiction translation, Jack has learned about the history of philosophical thought in China, monastic mural painting and thangka art, Republican-era sci-fi, the punk scene in Kuala Lumpur, China silk in Hollywood, Taiwanese indigenous architecture, and much more. He has taught translation at the universities of Leeds and Aberdeen, SOAS and Hong Kong Baptist University, and writes for the China Books Review.

Translation Project

The Life Course of the Han River (《汉水的身世》, Citic, 2022), or The Han River Prayer as the writer originally planned to call it, is 袁凌 Yuan Ling's biography of the chief source of water for more than 60 million people in Northern China, which gave the Han Dynasty, Han people and Han language their name. A native of the river's basin, Yuan Ling has travelled its course for decades, meeting and documenting the lives of the sailors, fishermen and migrants who reside and work along it, recording the changes wrought on their livelihoods and the natural environment, first, by industrial development, then by the imperfect measures put in place to curb further damage.

Retreat Fellow · Translation Fellowship Stipend Recipient

Nicole Liu is a writer, translator, interpreter, and PhD student based in Chicago. She translates into and from Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. Her current research focuses on the circumstances shaping contemporary literature production and circulation in the Pearl River Delta region. You can find Nicole's most recent works and translations in Qilu Criticism and te magazine issue 4: Spinal Memory.

Translation Project

Nicole will be translating a series of personal essays, first-person reportage, and artist statements sourced from independent journals created by and dedicated to vocational school students in mainland China. With the support of Frontline Fellowship, she is interested in exploring the specific ways translation can become an extension of the collaborative, creative process that is central to the ethos of these journals. She hopes that her translations can join the effort of providing a broader readership with new insights into vocational school students and shifting more readers into considering these frequently marginalized figures as potential collaborators, reciprocal readers, and fellow writers.

Retreat Fellow · Translation Fellowship Stipend Recipient

Hannah Lund is a writer, editor, and translator with a master's degree in comparative and world literature from Zhejiang University. She was shortlisted for the 9th Bai Meigui Translation Competition through the University of Leeds, and her translations have appeared in Sixth Tone, The Shanghai Literary Review, the documentary Calling Back From Wuhan, and an anthology through the Northeast Asia Art Archive. Her first book-length translation is forthcoming through Goldmye. Her own nonfiction writing has appeared in Brink, The Boston Globe, Atlas Obscura, The Shanghai Literary Review, Speculative Nonfiction, and more. After living in China for 12 years, she is now based in Chicago, where she currently works at The University of Chicago Press and edits for Asymptote journal.

Translation Project

A collection of humor essays by a writer originally from Shandong who made his home in the United States. The essays describe the strange practices and cultural differences of his new home for readers back in the Chinese-speaking world. Rife with sharp humor and observations, the essays are imbued with a strong sense of curiosity and deep appreciation for the mundanities that make us all human.

I happened upon the collection more than a decade ago. At the time, I assumed it would be akin to Horace Miner's Body Ritual Among the Nacirema in how it would point out the oddities in the land I technically called my home—which I was eager to see, especially after listening to expats complain about all the ways China just didn't get it for over a year. The collection ended up being so much more than that. It has such joie de vivre, which is downright inspiring. Since relocating to the U.S. after living in China for 12 years, I've returned to this collection. This time, I am struck by the profound love within the humor, and how the vantage point of the "outsider" (whether imposed on him or worn as a writing persona) can be a precious, though precarious, perspective. Even now, living in a culture that I am expected to remember and "go back" to, my time away in China has left me feeling like an eternal outsider—which, as the essays illustrate, is not always a bad thing, and which just might be what it means to be a translator.

Retreat Fellow

Tianren Luo is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University and currently a Cogut Collaborative Humanities Fellow. An interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and activist, they work at the intersections of racial capitalism, extractivism, decolonial theory, and contemporary art criticism, with a focus on postcolonial Africa and Asia. Tianren's project examines the entanglement among extractivism, transoceanic logistics and racial capitalism across Africa and Asia in post-1980s global capitalism. Working transcontinentally with experimental films, novels, photography, and archives from various port cities, their project rethinks the concepts of "zones" and "zonal capitalism" and revisits critiques of the "offshore" by foregrounding an Afro-Asian relational geography as a site of ongoing imperial formation and a frontier of transnational resistance and decolonial knowledge production. Tianren has also written against data capitalism, including critical studies on surveillance state infrastructure and the racial-colonial logistics of AI extractivism. Working across English, French, and Mandarin Chinese, they have also translated poetry and activist writings. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including Cultural Politics, positions politics, Theory, Culture & Society, ASAP/Review, and Critical Asian Studies, among others.

Translation Project

Written following the authors' post-pandemic return to Nairobi, "Observations on the 'Chinatowns' in Kenya" traces the transformations of an African global city alongside the ongoing formation of "Global China." On one hand, rapid gentrification driven by Chinese capital investment is visibly reshaping the city's aesthetics through newly erected glass towers, apartment buildings under construction, and real estate advertisements. On the other hand, Nairobi has gained rising visibility on Chinese social media under hashtags like "Work Abroad in Africa" and "Go to Africa to Invest." Nairobi's Chinatown has thus become an emergent site where these trends converge. Wang and Su trace five scenes of everyday interaction that continuously remake this space—from the "Ramax Shopping Village" to online delivery platforms launched by Chinese diasporic communities. In doing so, as the authors write, the piece "presents to readers the dynamic tension in the localization of Global China in Africa: segregated while interdependent, with both boundaries and negotiation traversing them."