The Academy of American Poets has extended the deadline for its Raiziss/de Palchi Book Award, a five-thousand-dollar award given for an English translation of a book of Italian poetry. Publishers may now submit books through January 30.

The judges for this year's prize are Jennifer Scappettone, a poet and professor of English at University of Chicago; Paolo Valesio, professor of Italian literature at Columbia University; and Lawrence Venuti, a professor of English who works in literary translation at Temple University.

The book prize alternates with a fellowship given to a translator of Italian poetry embarking on a specific project. Past winners of the awards (no winner was selected for the fellowship in 2009) are:

2008 Book Award
Patrick Barron
The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto

2007 Fellowship
Adria Bernardi
Small Talk by Rafaello Baldini

2006 Book Prize
John DuVal
Tales of Trilussa by Carlo Alberto Salustri

2005 Fellowship
Ann Snodgrass
Selected Poems of Vittorio Sereni

2004
Andrew Frisardi
The Selected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti

2003 Fellowship
Michael Palma
Selected Poems of Giovanni Raboni

2002 Book Prize
Stephen Sartarelli
Songbook: The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba

2001 Fellowship
Emanuel di Pasquale
Sharing a Trip: Selected Poems by Silvio Ramat

2000 Book Prize
John P. Welle and Ruth Feldman
Peasants Wake for Fellini's Casanova by Andrea Zanzotto

1999 Fellowship
Geoffrey Brock
Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930–1950 by Cesare Pavese

1998 Book Prize
Michael Palma
The Man I Pretend to Be: The Colloquies and Selected Poems of Guido Gozzano

1997 Fellowship
Anthony Molino
Esercizi di tiptologia by Valerio Magrelli

1996 Book Prize
W. S. Di Piero
This Strange Joy: Selected Poems of Sandro Penna 

This month, the Academy is also open to submissions to the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for English translations, published in 2009, of books of poetry originally written in any language. The deadline is December 31.

PEN American Center and the French-American Foundation are also accepting entries to their respective translation book prizes. Publishers, agents, or translators may submit books published this year by December 14 for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, given for a poetry collection, and the PEN Translation Prize, given for a book of poetry or prose. The French-American Foundation awards two translation prizes for a book of fiction and a book of nonfiction (including creative nonfiction) originally in French; the deadline for translations published in 2009 is December 31.

For writers currently working on a translation project, the National Endowment for the Arts is open to applications for its translation fellowships of up to twenty five thousand dollars until January 7. Buona fortuna!

At a ceremony in London, the BBC announced the winner of the fourth annual National Short Story Award, a fifteen-thousand-pound prize (approximately $24,700) given for a single piece of short fiction by a U.K. writer. Kate Clanchy took the prize for "The Not-Dead and the Saved," which was selected from nearly seven hundred entries. Sara Maitland was honored as runner up, receiving three thousand pounds (approximately $4,900), for her story "Moss Witch."

The finalists were Naomi Alderman, winner of the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers, for "Other People's Gods"; Jane Rogers for "Hitting Trees With Sticks"; and Orange Prize winner Lionel Shriver for "Exchange Rates." All of the shortlisted stories were presented last week on BBC's Radio Four, where "the short story continues to hold its own," according to the BBC Web site. Podcasts of the readings are available on the site.

Novelist Dame Margaret Drabble, journalist Tom Sutcliffe, and singer Will Young were the judges.

For writers looking to submit to story competitions on this side of the pond, here's a rundown of this month's contests, all open for entries:
Crazyhorse's Fiction Prize
Submit a story of up to 25 pages by December 15.

White Eagle Coffee Store Press's A. E. Coppard Prize
Submit a story of eight-thousand to fourteen-thousand words by December 15.

North Carolina Writers Network's Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize
Submit a story of up to twelve pages by December 20.

Boulevard's Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers
Submit a story of any length by December 31.

Glimmer Train Press's Fiction Open
Submit a story of two-thousand to twenty-thousand words by December 31.

Ruth Hindman Foundation's H. E. Francis Short Story Competition
Submit a story of up to five thousand words by December 31.

In the video below, the Radio Four recording of Kate Clanchy's story is excerpted: 

Carpe Articulum, a seven-year-old literary review that "embraces all of the peripheral literary arts, including nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, novellas, short fiction, scientific papers, interviews with accomplished writers, and even photography" has opened its contest for a novella. The winning work will be published in the magazine, and the writer will receive a prize of one thousand dollars.

Novellas of 26 to 150 pages are eligible for submission before January 7. A twenty-five dollar entry fee includes a three-month digital subscription to the journal.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a poet and fiction writer, will be the judge. According to her Web site, the author of the novel The Palace of Illusions (Anchor, 2009) and the short story collection Arranged Marriage (Anchor, 1996) often writes on "women, immigration, the South Asian experience, history, myth, magic and celebrating diversity." She teaches writing at the University of Houston.

In the video below, Divakaruni talks about the risks she took in writing her novel The Mistress of Spices (Anchor, 1997).

Three poets have been selected as recipients of the first Poetry Series awards from Mississippi Review. They are Martha Greenwald of Louisville, Kentucky; Liana Quill of Falls Church, Virginia; and Christopher Salerno of Raleigh, North Carolina, who each received one thousand dollars, publication of their winning works by Mississippi Review, and one hundred author copies.

Dara Wier judged the competition, choosing Greenwald's Other Prohibited Items, Quill's Fifty Poems, and Salerno's Minimum Heroic for publication. Salerno is the author of one previous book, Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing House, 2006). The Poetry Series books, to be released in January, will be debut collections for both Greenwald and Quill.

The award finalists were Jeannine Hall Gailey for her manuscript "The Robot Scientist's Daughter," Ian Ganassi for "mean numbers," Jonathan Musgrove for "A Hand in Place of a Hand," Jason Schneiderman for "Striking Surface," Andrew Sofer for "Wave," Liz Waldner for "Homeseeker's Paradise," and Theodore Worozbyt for "Tuesday Marriage Death."

A poem by finalist Jason Schneiderman is brought to life in the video below.