About our Researchers

Juan Miguel Zarandona teaches at the Soria Faculty of Translation, University of Valladolid, Spain. He is a member of the Spanish Association of Africanists (AEA) and EACLALS. He is specialized in the  literature and culture of South Africa and is head of the Afriqana Research Group and the Tradhuc Research Group (Cultural Translation and Translation of the Humanities).

Juan has visited South Africa several times on lengthy research visits and has translated the following South African authors into Spanish: C. M. van de Heever, Herman Charles Bosman, Pauline Smith, Bessie Head, Olive Schreiner, S. P. Benjamin, Johan van Wyk, Lindsey Collin, and Ahmed Essop. In August 2013, he performed a research stay at the University of Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand, both in Johannesburg where he started to specialize in the South African Indian writer Ahmed Essop (1931- ). 

He is the series editor of a book publishing a selection of short stories by Ahmed Essop in Spanish and Catalan translation, and of a second book on a selection of Indian Ocean contemporary texts into Spanish, Catalan, Galician, and Basque. They have been published by the University of Valladolid Press, within its collection Disbabelia, devoted to texts and writers who have never been translated into Spanish.