The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is delighted to announce the 2025 ALTA Travel Fellows!

Each year, between four and six $1,000 Travel Fellowships are awarded to emerging (unpublished or minimally published) translators to help them pay for hotel and travel expenses to the annual ALTA conference. 2025 marks the tenth year of the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellowship, preferentially awarded to an emerging translator of color or a translator working from an underrepresented diaspora or stateless language.

This year’s winners were selected by judges Anam Zafar, Christina Ng, and Izidora Angel. The 2025 ALTA Travel Fellowships are made possible thanks to the generous support of ALTA’s Past Presidents Council, the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fund, and numerous individual donors, including translators and other devoted supporters of the craft and art of literary translation.

ALTA will celebrate this year’s Travel Fellows with a reading at ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA48: Visions and Versions. The ALTA48 conference will take place from November 5-8 in Tucson, AZ.

Meet the 2025 ALTA Travel Fellows below, and learn more about them on this page.

Catherine XinXin Yu, 2025 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow (Chinese, Italian)

Catherine Xinxin Yu is a literary translator working with Chinese, Cantonese, English, and Italian. They were shortlisted for the PEN Presents x International Booker Grant in 2025 as the translator of Little Brother by Chan Wai. Their works appear in Asymptote, The Oxonian Review, Full Stop, and elsewhere. They are an assistant fiction editor at Asymptote.

Elete Nelson-Fearon, 2025 Travel Fellow (Arabic, Spanish)

Elete Nelson-Fearon is a translator, editor and educator working between Arabic, Spanish and English. Elete was the 2024-25 editorial fellow at Words Without Borders and has recently completed the Foreign Affairs theatre translation mentorship, where she translated Palestinian Chilean play Irreversible Palestine. Elete has translated plays, articles, poems and short stories from Egypt, Mexico, Palestine and Spain.

Mariana Ortigão, 2025 Travel Fellow (European Portuguese, Spanish)

Mariana Ortigão is a literary translator from Portuguese and Spanish to English. She is currently translating Sandra Catarino’s novel “Os Fios,” and co-translating three female Uruguayan poets for the anthology “Flores Raras” with the translator Marialena Carr. She is currently pursuing an online certificate in Translation and Interpreting at UMass Amherst.

Marianna Suleymanova, 2025 Travel Fellow (Russian)

Marianna Suleymanova is a literary translator from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, currently living in Philadelphia. She enjoys rendering the voices of contemporary Russian-language writers in English and is committed to amplifying suppressed narratives and dissident voices. She is the winner of the 2024 Words Without Borders Momentum Grant.

Learn more about this year’s ALTA Travel Fellows on this page.

The following applicants are honorably mentioned as this year’s Travel Fellowship finalists:

  • Magdalena Arias
  • Gauri Awasthi
  • Nayereh Doosti
  • Olga Mexina
  • Colleen Noland