Editor and literature consultant, Bill Swainson OBE, has received an honorary degree from Lancaster University.
A Consultant Editor at MacLehose Press and a trustee of Lancaster Literature Festival (LitFest) and of the Cultural Philanthropy Foundation, he was Senior Commissioning Editor at Bloomsbury for 15 years and previously worked for the Harvill Press, Allison & Busby and John Calder.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL), he was awarded an OBE for services to literary translation in 2015.
Literary authors he has brought into English include Javier Cercas, Boualem Sansal, Judith Schalansky, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez.
Non-fiction titles include An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore, Democracy and Its Crisis by A. C. Grayling, The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Cold War by Edward Lucas and Gabriel García Márquez: A Life by Gerald Martin.
He has been a literary adviser to the British Centre for Literary Translation and a board member of the Poetry Society, The Poetry Book Society and the Poetry Translation Centre.
He is currently editing Gerald Martin's monumental biography of Mario Vargas Llosa.
