2025 Mentorships
The 2025 Emerging Translator Mentorships are offered in 18 categories. Learn more about the mentees and their mentors below. See our past mentorships.
Mentees
Mentors
Michelle Chan Schmidt
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Pronouns
she/her
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Languages
Chinese to English -
Mentee
2025
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Michelle Chan Schmidt is translating a collection of poetry by an author from Hong Kong from the Complex Chinese.
Born in Hong Kong in 2002, Michelle Chan Schmidt (she/her) is a writer, editor, photographer, and translator, from Complex Chinese to English and French. She moved to Europe with her family in 2013 and has lived in Ireland since 2022, where she is a Foundation Scholar of English literature and history at Trinity College, Dublin, and waters plants at Marrowbone Books. She joined Asymptote as an assistant fiction editor in 2022 and guest-edited a Full Stop Special Issue as their 2023 Editorial Fellow, on ‘Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities.’ Her reviews, essays, interviews, and creative writing have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Cleveland Review of Books, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Full Stop, La Piccioletta Barca, Public Books, Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, and Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine.
While Michelle has experience around Hong Kong literature as a reader, student, critic, and research assistant — at the Education University of Hong Kong — the ALTA 2025 Emerging Translator Mentorship Program is her first sustained foray into the practice of literary translation, which she recognizes as a powerful mode of narrative-making. She particularly appreciates Hongkongese literature for its formal experimentation. She is also invested in global literature as resistance to structural oppression, and enjoys reading anticolonial and urban history. Her favorite bookshop in Hong Kong is Book Punch, and she is intermittently at work on what might become a novel. She hopes to pursue a PhD in comparative literature on the intersections between critical theory and contemporary writing.