Sam Taylor – Translator

I'm an award-winning literary translator who's translated more than 60 books from French to English. My authors include acclaimed names such as Leïla Slimani, Laurent Binet, Maylis de Kerangal and a certain Marcel Proust, as well as bestselling French authors such as Marc Levy, Michel Bussi and David Foenkinos. I'm also a novelist myself. I published four novels between 2005 and 2011, and my fifth novel will come out next year. I grew up in England, spent a decade in France, and now live in the United States. I have won several awards, including the 2017 French-American Translation Prize and the 2022 C.K. Scott Moncrieff Prize, and have been nominated twice for the International Booker Prize. In addition to literary novels, I have translated thrillers, biographies, autobiographies, graphic novels and screenplays for film and television.

Please feel free to contact me with your translation request. If you can provide me with the word count, a desired deadline and a sample of the work itself, I'll email you promptly with a price and a delivery date. I always suggest translating a small sample of the work first, so that you can get an idea of how your book will read in English and so that you can let me know if there's anything you would like done differently. In addition to being a translator and a writer, I have also worked as a sub-editor at The Observer, so the translation you receive from me will be copyedited and publishable. Et si vous préférez parler français avec moi, ce n'est pas un problème.


TESTIMONIALS

Tatiana de Rosnay, author of Manderley Forever:

I am so impressed with your fantastic translation. It’s never easy to translate a bilingual author. You have managed to capture the essence of my book in an extraordinary and truthful way.

Clémentine Beauvais, author of In Paris With You:

Reading the first full draft of Sam’s translation of my book was doubtlessly one of the most wonderful and uncanny experiences of my writing life so far, and working with him over the next few months was exhilarating, intellectually and artistically rewarding, and above all a lot of fun.

Jean-Baptiste Andrea, author of A Hundred Million Years and a Day:

When I was in the film business, I always wanted to kill myself every time I read a translation of one of my scripts for international sales. So I never thought I would ever be happy with a translation, but you just nailed it. I recognized my novel in another language.