For two Banach spaces X and Y, we denote by K(X,Y) (resp. B(X,Y)) the space of all compact (resp. bounded) linear operators from X to Y. In this paper, we show that for 1\leq p,q<\infty, K(\ell _{p},\ell _{q}) is an 8-Lipschitz retract of B(\ell _{p},\ell _{q}). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]