Peter Bush (linguist)

Peter R. Bush (born 1946) is a prize-winning English literary translator. He has translated works from Catalan, French, Spanish and Portuguese to English, including the work of Josep Pla, Joan Sales and Merce Rodoreda.

Peter Bush was born in Spalding, Lincolnshire. His father, from a large rural working-class family, was a print worker and trade unionist; his mother grew up in an urban working-class family in Sheffield. He studied French and Spanish at Cambridge University before gaining a DPhil in Spanish history and fiction from Oxford University.

Though Bush translated various Marxist economic and political analyses between 1967 and 1972, since then he has only translated literary texts. He has spoken of the crucial importance in his life of translating Juan Goytisolo:

"I suppose my first Goytisolo translations brought something of a decisive change in my life. The translation of his work has been inseparable from the way my life has developed."

Bush has been very active not only as a literary translator, but also in developing literary translation as an academic discipline - by working in the academic world; serving in key literary translation organisations; serving on the editorial boards of literary translation publications; and organising international events and projects.

After teaching in London schools he joined Middlesex University where he was Associate Senior Lecturer in Spanish (1993-1995), Reader in Literary Translation (1995-1997) and Professor of Literary Translation (1997-1998). He then moved to the University of East Anglia, where he was Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) (1998-2003), and Professor of Literary Translation at the School of English and American Studies. He has been a Visiting Professor at University of São Paulo (1996), Boston University (1996, 1999) and Beijing University (2001).

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