Thomas Teal

Harvard Book Store is very pleased to welcome award-winning translator THOMAS TEAL as he discusses his work translating the novels of Tove Jansson from the original Swedish.

Although Tove Jansson is perhaps best known for her children's books featuring the Moomins, she also wrote a number of works for adults. Thomas Teal has translated four, including The Summer Book, Sun City,  his most recent translation, The True Deceiver, and the newly re-released Fair Play.

In Fair Play, Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they’ve never really stopped taking each other by surprise. Fair Play shows us Mari and Jona’s intertwined lives as they watch Fassbinder films and Westerns, critique each other’s work, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson’s The Summer Book), travel through the American Southwest, and turn life into nothing less than art.