Quintin Hoare

Quintin Hoare (b.1938) won his first translation prize at school for a rending of Homer, and studied Modern Languages at Oxford. In 1962 he joined the editorial committee of New Left Review, acting as its managing editor from 1963 to 1979, and publishing there in 1968 perhaps the earliest English-language version of Walter Benjamin, before resigning along with most of the editorial committee in 1993. With Geoffrey Nowell Smith he edited and translated Selections from the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci, going on to edit the latter’s Political Writings 1910-20 and to translate and edit Political Writings 1921-26, winning the John Florio Prize in 1978/9. From French, his translations have included works by Sartre (for whose War Diaries he won the Scott-Moncrieff Prize in 1984), de Beauvoir, Nizan, and Rousseau. From German, he has translated works by Grab and Kracauer, and was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1989.   He has also translated works from Russian and Bosnian, and was general editor of the Pelican Marx Library. He was a founding editor of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, a founding member in 1993 of the Alliance to Defend Bosnia-Herzegovina, and director from 1997 of The Bosnian Institute, co-authoring with Noel Malcolm Books on Bosnia (1999). Married to the historian Branka Magaš, their two sons are Marko Attila (also a historian) and Leo Kublai (an IT consultant), and they have five grandchildren: Orla, Emi, Max, Cecilia and Hector.