About
Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan into English. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she has spent extended periods of time in the United States, Mexico, Switzerland, Scotland, and Catalonia, giving her an intimate knowledge of the languages, cultures, and literatures she works in. She is a founding member of Cedilla & Co., a collective of translators committed to making international voices heard in English, and Chair of the Translators Group of the Authors Guild.
Julia holds a BA in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona. She has translated the works of Geovani Martins, Daniel Galera, Susana Moreira Marques, Claudia Hernández, and Noemi Jaffe, among others.
Featured Work
The Sun on My Head by Geovani Martins
In The Sun on My Head, Geovani Martins recounts the experiences of boys growing up in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the early years of the twenty-first century. Drawing on his childhood and adolescence, Martins uses the rhythms and slang of his neighborhood dialect to capture the texture of life in the slums, where every day is shadowed by a ubiquitous drug culture, the constant threat of the police, and the confines of poverty, violence, and racial oppression. And yet these are also stories of friendship, romance, and momentary relief, as in “Rolézim,” where a group of teenagers head to the beach. Other stories, all uncompromising in their realism and yet diverse in narrative form, explore the changes that occur when militarized police occupy the favelas in the lead-up to the World Cup, the cycles of violence in the narcotics trade, and the feelings of invisibility that define the realities of so many in Rio’s underclass.
The Sun on My Head is a work of great talent and sensitivity, a daring evocation of life in the favelas by a rising star rooted in the community he portrays.
