Fonds DBG - Dorothy Blair Archive

Dr Dorothy Blair was a well-known translator of French and francophone literature into English.

Dorothy Blair (nee Greene) died on 12 November 1998 at the age of 85. Born in Birmingham, she was awarded a scholarship to Royal Holloway and, after graduating, trained at Cambridge to teach French. Her marriage in 1939 to Dr Maurice Blair took her to South Africa, where she spent 37 years bringing up 3 children and pursuing her career, first as a university lecturer at the University of Cape Town, and eventually as professor and acting head of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Witwatersrand. She published her doctoral thesis on the poet Jules Supervielle and became an authority on the emergent literature of Francophone Africa, publishing 'African Literature in French' in 1976. On her retirement she settled in Brighton and, while continuing critical writing, began freelance literary translations from French, specialising in works from the Caribbean and Africa, including the Maghreb.