Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, and her work has brought her many prizes, among them the Portuguese Translation Prize for The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa in 1992; the translator’s portion of the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for A Heart So White; the 2000 Weidenfeld Translation Prize for José Saramago’s All the Names; the 2008 Pen/Book-of-the-Month Club and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prizes for The Maias by Eça de Queiroz; the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Elephant’s Journey by José Saramago; the 2012 Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for The Word Tree by Teolinda Gersão; and, most recently, the 2015 Marsh Award for Children’s Fiction in Translation for Bernardo Atxaga’s The Adventures of Shola.
In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 was awarded an OBE for services to literature. In 2015 she was given an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Leeds.