Deadline Approaches for National Translation Awards
Nominations are currently open for the 2015 American Literary Translators Association’s National Translation Awards (NTA) in poetry and prose, and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. Individual prizes of $5,000 are awarded annually to book-length works of translation published during the previous year.
For the National Translation Awards, publishers and translators are invited to nominate translations from any language into English. The Lucien Stryk prize accepts nominations of book-length translations of Asian poetry or Zen Buddhist texts into English. The NTA and Lucien Stryk prizes are sponsored by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) to support the organization’s goal of advancing the quality and art of literary translation.
For both the NTA and Lucien Stryk awards, PDF files of translated books should be uploaded using the online submission manager by May 1. Submissions are judged according to the “literary significance of the original and the success of the translation in recreating the artistry of the original.” For complete guidelines and eligibility requirements, visit the ALTA website.
This year’s award-winning translators and finalists will be honored at the thirty-eighth annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association in Tucson, Arizona. Judges for the 2015 NTA in prose are Pamela Carmell, Jason Grunebaum, and Anne Magnan-Park. The judges in poetry are Lisa Rose Bradford, Stephen Kessler, and Diana Throw. The 2015 Lucien Stryk prize judges are Lucas Klein, Janet Poole, and Stephen Snyder.
Now in its seventeenth year, the National Translation Award is the oldest prize for a work of literary translation. This year marks the first time the prize will be given in both the poetry and prose categories. Last year, Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich won for their translation of Russian poet Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation For Me to Think (New York Review Books, 2013).
The Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize was established in 2009 to “recognize the importance of Asian translation for international literature,” and is named for acclaimed translator of Asian poetry and Zen Buddhist Lucien Stryk. The 2014 winner was Jonathan Chaves for his book Every Rock a Universe: The Yellow Mountains and Chinese Travel Writing (Floating World Editions, 2013), which includes the first complete translation of Chinese poet Wang Hongdu’s Comprehending the Essentials of the Yellow Mountains.
ATLA will also award four to six travel fellowships of $1,000 each to emerging translators to attend the ATLA conference in Tuscon on October 28. Submissions are open until June 1. Fellowship eligibility requirements and application guidelines are available online.
For inquiries, e-mail ALTA managing director Erica Mena at erica@literarytranslators.org.
The winner in fiction is Anthony Doerr for All the Light we Cannot See (Scribner). The finalists were Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You (Ecco), Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account (Pantheon), and Joyce Carol Oates’s Lovely, Dark, Deep (Ecco). The winner in poetry is Gregory Pardlo for Digest (Four Way Books). The finalists were Alan Shapiro’s Reel to Reel (University of Chicago), and Arthur Sze’s Compass Rose (Copper Canyon Press).
Judges Alexander Chee, Marc Fitten, and Dierdre McNamer chose Lish’s novel from 360 entries. “With ferocious precision, Atticus Lish scours and illuminates the vast, traumatized America that lives, works, and loves outside the castle gates," said McNamer. “The result is an incantation, a song of ourselves, a shout.”
