Meet the 2024 Mentees: Sophie Grace Lellman (Literature from Québec)

 Sophie Grace Lellman will translate Jennifer Bélanger’s Menthol from French. 

(Image Description: Sophie, a white woman with medium-length brown hair and blue eyes, sits in front of a brick wall, looking at the camera with a slight smile. She wears a blue coat with buttons and a white shirt.)  

Sophie Grace Lellman is from a small town in Massachusetts, where she began studying French as a child. During high school, she had the opportunity to participate in an exchange and spent three wonderful weeks near Lyon, where she discovered the joy and satisfaction that come with learning to communicate in another language. This experience sparked a general interest in languages, and she went on to study French, Portuguese, and Mandarin Chinese while completing her undergraduate degree in Linguistics at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. After working as an English teacher in Budapest, Hungary for a year and a half, Sophie returned to school, earning her MA in Comparative Literature from King’s College London. She received a mark of distinction on her dissertation on the use of illness as a rhetorical tool in ecofiction. Following her graduation, Sophie moved to New York City, where she now works as a bookseller and in editing and publicity for two translation-focused independent publishers.  

Sophie has always been a reader, and her enthusiasm for translated literature has led, quite naturally, to an interest in working on translations herself. In one of her first experiments in translation, she worked on a rhyming poem her grandmother remembered from reading every Christmas as a child. She likes to practice with stories and short excerpts from novels she enjoys, and is excited to tackle her first book-length work. She is particularly interested in working with literature from Québec. Growing up, she struggled to reconcile the Parisian French she was learning in school with her grandmother’s Québécois, and, as an adult, she has enjoyed learning more about the language as it is spoken in Canada. Delving more deeply into the literature and culture of Québec, she feels she is beginning to bridge the gap between the two Frenches.  

Sophie’s interest in writing about illness led her to Jennifer Bélanger’s slippery and engrossing debut novel Menthol (Héliotrope, 2020). During the mentorship, Sophie will be working on the book, which takes a fresh approach to a young woman’s struggle with chronic illness and explores the narrator’s childhood and her difficult relationship with her mother. Sophie is excited to work with Madeleine Stratford to develop her translation skills and deepen her knowledge of Québec French, and is grateful for the support of ALTA’s Mentorship Program.