Online Summer Arabic Translation Workshop Open for Applications

The British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) Arabic Summer Workshop is now open for applications. These year’s workshops will feature twelve separate strands — including Arabic (led by Sawad Hussain, with participation by author Omaima Abdullah Al-Khamis), multilingual prose fiction (led by Michele Hutchison), and “training the trainer” (led by Daniel Hahn) — all of which will be held online.

While some of the programs will cost £375, the BCLT’s Arabic workshop series will be free for all ten chosen participants. The workshops are set to take place from Monday July 20 through Friday July 24 of this year.

For the Arabic workshop, there will be a focus on working with Omaima Al-Khamis’s novel The Al Musharaq Family’s Aunt, which was longlisted for the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

Interested translators and aspiring translators can apply at the University of East Anglia website. The closing date for applications is Sunday March 15, 2026. According to organizers, all applicants who apply before the deadline will be notified of the success of their application by mid-April.

Another online summer translation workshop for Arabic-English translators is the Oxford Translates workshop, set for July 6-10 of this year. It will also be led by Sawad Hussain. According to Sawad, this workshop has a particularly robust focus on the literary industry that includes a reader’s report workshop with Elizabeth Briggs from Saqi as well as some pitching sessions to editors. There’s more information on the Oxford University website.

Editor’s note: We are planning to have fewer of these translator-specific updates on the website; if you’re interested, you can sign up for our occasional Opportunities for Arabic<–>English Translators email newsletter.