Anthea Bell (10 May 1936 – 18 October 2018) was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include The Castle by Franz Kafka, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French Asterix comics with co-translator Derek Hockridge. Biography Bell was born in Suffolk on 10 May 1936. According to her own accounts, she picked up lateral thinking abilities essential in a translator from her father Adrian Bell, Suffolk author and the first Times cryptic crossword setter. Her mother, Marjorie Bell (née Gibson), was a home maker. The couple's son, Bell's brother, Martin, is a former BBC correspondent who was an independent Member of Parliament for one parliamentary term. After attending a boarding school in Bournemouth, she read English at Somerville College, Oxford. She was married to the publisher and writer Antony Kamm from 1957 to 1973; the couple had two sons, Richard and Oliver. Oliver Kamm is a leader writer for The Times. After her sons left home, she lived and worked in Cambridge. She died on 18 October 2018, aged 82. Works Anthea Bell's career as a translator began at the end of the 1950s when the German publisher Klaus Flugge asked Antony Kamm if he knew anyone able to translate Der kleine Wassermann, a book for children by Otfried Preussler. Kamm recommended his wife; Bell's English version entitled The Little Water Sprite was published in 1960. Eventually, she translated Preussler's entire works. Over the decades, Bell translated numerous Franco-Belgian comics of the bande dessinée genre into English, including Asterix – for which her new puns were praised for keeping the original French spirit intact. Peter Hunt, now Professor Emeritus in Children's Literature at Cardiff University, has written of her "ingenious translations" of the French originals which "in a way display the art of the translator at its best". Other comic books she has translated include Le Petit Nicolas, Lieutenant Blueberry, and Iznogoud. She specialised in translating children's literature, and re-translated Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales from Danish for the publishing house of G.P. Putnam's Sons. She also translated the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the Ruby Red Trilogy by Kerstin Gier. Other work includes The Princess and the Captain (2006), translated from La Princetta et le Capitaine by Anne-Laure Bondoux. Bell also translated into English many adult novels, as well as some books on