Translating Duanwad Pimwana: Translator Mui Poopoksakul in conversation with Nina MacLaughlin

Duanwad Pimwana is a major voice in contemporary Thai literature. She won Southeast Asia’s most prestigious literary prize—the S.E.A. Write Award——in 2003 for her novel Bright, and she is also the recipient of awards from PEN International Thailand and others. Acclaimed for her subtle fusing magic realism with Thai urban culture, she has written nine books, and for the first time two of her books will be published in the US in English translation. Join us for a conversation with Duanwad’s Thai to English translator, Mui Pooposakul, who will discuss Duanwad’s work in the context of contemporary Thai literature.

Mui Poopoksakul is one of the leading translators of Thai literature into English. She guest-edited an issue of Words Without Borders on Thai literature, and she is also the recipient of the English PEN Translates Award and was named one of the 20 leading translators under 40 by The Culture Trip. She translated Duanwad Pimwana’s novel Bright(Two Lines Press, 2019) the first translated novel by a Thai woman to ever be published in the US, and the collection of short stories Arid Dreams (Feminist Press, 2019).

Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (W.W. Norton), and Wake, Siren, a retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the perspectives of the female figures who are transformed, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux this fall. She spent most of her twenties working at the alternative newsweekly the Boston Phoenix, most of her thirties working as a carpenter, and she writes the New England literary news column for the Boston Globe. She lives in Cambridge.