Name Ranjit Bolt Role Playwright | Parents Sydney Bolt | |
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Books Losing It, The Art of Translation, The Misanthrope | ||
Ranjit Bolt OBE (born 1959) is a British playwright and translator. He was born in Manchester of Anglo-Indian parents and is the nephew of playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt. His father is literary critic Sydney Bolt, author of several books including A preface to James Joyce, and his mother has worked as a teacher of English.
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Life and career
Bolt was educated at The Perse School and the University of Oxford, and worked as a stockbroker for eight years but "I was desperate to escape, any escape route would have done, and translating turned out to be the one". As well as his plays, he has published a novel in verse, Losing it and a verse translation for children of the fables of La Fontaine, The Hare and the Tortoise. His new version of Cyrano de Bergerac opened on New York at the Roundabout Theatre in September 2012, with Douglas Hodge in the title role. He is currently working on an adaptation of Volpone for Sir Trevor Nunn, to be produced by the RSC this summer. He was awarded the OBE in 2003 for services to literature.
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Asked about his approach to translating plays, he has said:
In August 2014, Bolt was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.
Publications
Ranjit Bolt has translated many classic plays into English, most of them into verse. Among his works are:
Performances of his work
In 2014 he wrote an English version of the text for Mozart's comic opera, The Impresario, which was given by The Santa Fe Opera in Santa Fe, New Mexico in a double bill paired with Igor Stravinsky's The Nightingale. In 2017, his Tartuffe was performed at Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario.