Barbara Bray

Barbara Bray (née Jacobs; 24 November 1924 – 25 February 2010) was an English translator and critic.

Bray was born with to parents with Belgian and Jewish origins in Maida Vale, London. An identical twin (her sister Olive Classe is also a translator), she was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she read English, with papers in French and Italian and gained a First. She married John Bray, an Australian-born RAF pilot, after the couple graduated from Cambridge, and had two daughters, Francesca and Julia. Bray became a widow in 1958 after her husband died in an accident in Cyprus.

Bray became a script editor in 1953 for the BBC Third Programme, commissioning and translating European twentieth-century avant-garde writing for the network. Harold Pinter wrote some of his earliest work at Bray's insistence.

From about 1961, Bray lived in Paris and established a career as a translator and critic. She translated the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert, and work by leading French speaking writers of her own time including Marguerite Duras, Amin Maalouf, Julia Kristeva, Michel Quint, Jean Anouilh, Michel Tournier, Jean Genet, Alain Bosquet, Réjean Ducharme and Philippe Sollers. She received the PEN Translation Prize in 1986.

Bray collaborated with the film director Joseph Losey on the screenplay for Galileo (1975), which was an adaptation of the play by Bertolt Brecht. During the same decade, they collaborated on the script for a biographical film about Ibn Sa'ud, the founder of Saudi Arabia and (with Harold Pinter), she wrote an adaptation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

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