Rainier Grutman

I started studying bilingual writers and multilingual texts in the late 1980s, long before they became fashionable research topics. Paying particular attention to these phenomena in the two countries I know best, Belgium and Canada, I also investigated past and present multilingual writing in Spain and Italy, as well as in “metropolitan” France. The book that grew out of my PhD on multilingualism in Quebec (Des langues qui résonnent, Montréal, 1997), was awarded the Gabrielle-Roy prize for Canadian literary criticism. It was updated for a 20th-anniversary edition with Paris publisher, Classiques Garnier. Widely reviewed and quoted, its terminology has become a staple of postcolonial studies in France, Italy, and French-speaking Africa. I was gradually able to combine literary scholarschip with an ongoing interest in translation studies (developed during my studies at the KU Leuven under Prof. José Lambert). Self-translation, i.e., the practice of bilingual writers who translate their own work, has become a focal point in this respect.