Sofia E.V. Hamett

Sofia E.V. Hamett is a French–English literary translator who fell in love, early and completely, with the great serial novels of the nineteenth century — the feuilletons that were devoured in cafés, read aloud by lamplight, and waited for week after week in the pages of the daily papers.

Raised between France and England, she grew up bilingual and book-hungry, sliding easily between Dickens and Dumas, Wilkie Collins and Eugène Sue. It was Ponson du Terrail's Rocambole, discovered in a battered secondhand edition, that changed everything: a sprawling, breathless, gloriously reckless world she couldn't believe had never been given to English readers in full.

THE ROCAMBOLE PROJECT is her answer to that absence — a complete, unabridged translation of Ponson du Terrail's saga, carried out one volume at a time with equal parts scholarship and delight. Her aim is not to smooth the old master into something modern and tame, but to keep his velocity, his shadows, and his sense of mischief intact, while making every page sing in English.

She works under the banner of NIGHT WORKERS, a small press devoted to the forgotten giants of popular fiction — the writers who worked after dark, for readers who couldn't put the story down. She would be glad, she says, if you couldn't either.