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Sonya Malaborza

Sonya Malaborza

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Originally from Rexton, New Brunswick, Sonya Malaborza took a long detour to Toronto, then Moncton, before settling a few kilometers from the village where she grew up. A reader, translator and incubator of ideas, Sonya takes pleasure in accompanying authors and translators in the exercise of their profession, notably as Publishing Director at Éditions Prise de parole. L’accoucheuse de Scots Bay, her translation of Ami McKay’s best-selling novel The Birth House, was published in 2020 and earned her a nomination for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in the translation category and for the Éloizes in the literary artist category. She also occasionally writes texts of her own; Prendre racine, her first collection, won the Prix Antonine-Maillet Acadie-Vie in 2024.

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30
April 2026

Literary Lunch: To Place a Rabbit

This novel begins when a scientist who has written a popular book of non-fiction attends a literary festival, where she strikes up a friendship with a charismatic novelist. The novelist reveals that her new work is an experiment: a novella she wrote in English only to have it translated and published solely in French—a language the novelist cannot read. Moreover, she has lost her original English manuscript of this work. Hearing this, the scientist, who is fluent in French, impulsively offers to retranslate the novella back into English for the novelist.

As she embarks on this task, the scientist finds herself haunted by vivid memories and distracting questions. These insert themselves into her translation process, troubling it, then disrupting it entirely. She desperately tries to complete her task before losing control of both the work and her well-organized existence.

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