Barbara Bray

Who was Barbara Bray?

Barbara Bray was an English translator and critic.

An identical twin, she was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she read English, with papers in French and Italian. 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, but her connection with Samuel Beckett became personal as well as professional.

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.

Her relationship with the married Beckett continued for the rest of his life, and Bray was one of the few people with whom the Irishman discussed his work. She suffered a stroke at the end of 2003.