Last year New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and Giramondo—publishers separated by oceans and time zones but sharing a language—opened submissions for a new collaboration, the Poetry in Translation Prize. In February they announced the inaugural winner: Osdany Morales’s Security Questions, translated from the Spanish by Harry Bauld.
The three publishers first collaborated on the Novel Prize, launched in 2020, which Nick Tapper, associate publisher at Giramondo, says arose out of their desire to see “the kind of energy and freedom and experimentation that’s often in the translated fiction [the three presses] publish that can be harder to find in English-language fiction.” As with the winners of the Novel Prize, Morales’s Security Questions will be published and distributed simultaneously in North America (New Directions), the U.K. and Ireland (Fitzcarraldo), and Australia and New Zealand (Giramondo).
Rachael Allen, who joined Fitzcarraldo in 2024 specifically to launch a poetry list, says that she and publisher Jacques Testard wanted to establish a poetry prize, especially after the White Review—which Testard edited and which hosted a yearly poet’s prize—ceased publication in 2023. But Allen and Testard weren’t sure how to structure it, who it would be open to, or how they would manage a broad call for submissions. “Jacques and I felt like we needed a way to access work that we might not be able to access otherwise,” Allen says, crediting Testard with narrowing the parameters to poetry in translation. Fitzcarraldo, like New Directions and Giramondo, already had a reputation for publishing translated prose, and with their existing relationship it naturally followed that the presses would collaborate on the new prize.
“I just feel so privileged to have access to this work before a shortlist is even drawn up,” Allen adds. “I have always wanted to try and make space for as many different kinds of poetry as possible in my publishing life, and this feels like the largest way I’ve attempted to do that.” The shortlist was chosen by Allen, Tapper, and New Directions’ Jeffrey Yang from 259 submissions in dozens of languages. Selections from each of the eight shortlisted poet-and-translator pairs were published by Granta (where Allen had launched a poetry list prior to working at Fitzcarraldo).
“We loved the shortlist,” Tapper says, adding that in choosing the prize-winning book, the editors were “aiming to represent poetry that…felt immediate and urgent, [and] the immediacy and urgency of Osdany’s poetry and Harry’s translation really cut through in a way that was hard to deny.”
“It is speaking to a lot of recent historical and contemporary concerns about borders and security and surveillance,” Allen says. Security Questions was originally published in 2015 by Bokeh, an imprint of Almenara Press (a Spanish-language publisher based in the U.S.), as El pasado es un pueblo solitario. Morales, who left Cuba and, after a couple of years in the Dominican Republic, came to New York, says that the book’s premise was inspired by his early days in the United States and what he calls the avalanche of online accounts he suddenly had to set up. “I wasn’t used to having my life on the internet,” he says. “So in those first few months when I was setting up this version of my life, the online part, I was all the time answering these security questions.”
You’re likely familiar with these: What is your mother’s maiden name? What was the name of your first pet? What was your high school mascot? Many of them are decidedly U.S.-centric in context and constantly reminded Morales of his immigrant status; Morales’s high school had no mascot, and his mother didn’t have a maiden name. “In a way these questions are imagining that everyone has this profile or this past,” he says. “The same kind of outline for each one of us.” In trying to answer the questions honestly, if only to himself, Morales, who is also a novelist and essayist, turned to poetry.
In 2020, Morales began teaching at Horace Mann School in New York City. Harry Bauld, another teacher there, says his ears perked up when he learned in a faculty meeting that the new hire in Spanish was a poet. He found a few of Morales’s poems online and translated one of them “as a way of introduction and welcome to the faculty kind of thing,” he says. Morales loved it, and Bauld translated the rest of the book and sent it to Morales. Since then the two have been meeting regularly to work on the translated poems together.
Both Morales and Bauld were fans of the three presses that launched the Poetry in Translation Prize and were excited to submit their manuscript for consideration. When the shortlist was announced, Bauld says, “I believe it is safe to say we were totally and absolutely thrilled,” a feeling that only compounded when they learned that they had won.
“I could hear my voice in another language,” Morales says about Bauld’s translation and adds that he’s excited about this award and its future. “Having this award for poetry in translation is a big step for poetry and for readers.”
Ilana Masad is the author of the novels Beings (Bloomsbury, 2025) and All My Mother’s Lovers (Dutton, 2020) and the coeditor of the anthology Here for All the Reasons: Why We Watch “The Bachelor” (Turner, May 2026).
