About

Hello! I’m Laura Shanahan, an editor and translator based in beautiful Bath in the UK. (Weighing Words is my company name – it’s a one-woman operation!)

I have worked in the publishing industry since 2016, starting out in academic publishing and quickly moving into trade fiction, where my heart really lies. I spent five years working as an editor for an independent press, building a list of literary and upmarket fiction, mostly by debut and early-career authors. I'm very proud to have been the editor for award-nominated novels such as Deborah Jenkins’s Braver, Lorraine Wilson’s Mother Sea and Allan Radcliffe’s The Old Haunts.

In early 2023 I went freelance, and I now work editorially with several publishing houses and agencies, as well as directly with authors. I am a trained copyeditor and proofreader, having completed courses with the CIEP and the Publishing Training Centre, and I'm also experienced in structural, developmental and line editing. You can find a list of all the editorial services I offer here.

Part of the reason I chose the freelance life was to make more space to pursue another (closely related and equally wordy) discipline: translation. My BA was in French and Italian, and in 2019 I completed a part-time MA in Literary Translation Studies, awarded with Distinction. Since then I have been taking on ad-hoc translation projects, working from both Italian and French into English. This strand of my work has led me in lots of quirky directions: I have translated material ranging from the mundane (marketing copy for a haircare brand) to the extraordinary (nineteenth-century French letters between a Russian tsar and his viceroy in Poland). One especially fascinating project involved translating an archive of historical French newspaper articles for the historian Kassia St Clair, who used extracts from my translations in her book The Race to the Future (John Murray, 2023).

I am particularly interested in working with literary texts, and my translations of short fiction have been published in World Literature Today, the Journal of Italian Translation and the anthology Virginia’s Sisters (Aurora Metro, 2023). I was runner-up in the 2018 World Literature Today Translation Prize, and have been both shortlisted and longlisted in the John Dryden Translation Competition. I would love to translate a full book as my next step into literary translation, and have recently been working on sample translations from a couple of French and Italian novels for which I'm hoping to find English publishers – watch this space!