Well done to our Y12 French student Tilly who won an award as part of the Anthea Bell Prize for Young translator 2026, a national competition run by the Queens' College at the University of Oxford.

Over 25.000 students took part. Entries were judged by professional literary translators and Modern Languages students at the University of Oxford.

The Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators is a UK-wide creative translation competition for students aged 11–18 with different categories for languages and Key Stage. Launched in 2020 by the Translation Exchange at The Queen's College, University of Oxford, it inspires students to explore modern languages by translating authentic, creative texts. This year, the passage was from the third volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, a modernist work of fiction first published in 1913. Proust’s famously long sentences were particularly hard to translate and required real flair. 

The prize is named in honour of the renowned literary translator Anthea Bell OBE (1936–2018). She was highly influential in the 20th and 21st centuries, celebrated for bringing iconic foreign works such as the Asterix comics to English-speaking audiences.