The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is delighted to announce the 2026 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Each year, between four and six $1,000 Travel Fellowships are awarded to emerging (unpublished or minimally published) translators to help them pay for hotel and travel expenses to the annual ALTA conference. 2026 marks the eleventh year of the Peter K.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 Anushka Sen, Calvin Olsen, and Michelle Mirabella. The 2026 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, ALTA49: Give and Take. The ALTA49 conference will take place from October 21-24, 2026 in Portland, OR.

Meet the 2026 ALTA Travel Fellows below, and learn more about them on this page.

Gayathri Sarvepalli, 2026 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow (Telugu)

Gayathri Sarvepalli is a literary translator from Telugu to English. She is currently translating Dr. Patanjali Sastri’s historical political fiction novella, Veeranayakudu. Gayathri participated in the 2024-25 cohort of TILT, a literary translation workshop led by Ros Schwartz and organized by Chaaya Books and Aju Publications.

Cynthia Shin, 2026 Travel Fellow (Korean)

Cynthia Shin (she/they) is an emerging translator working with contemporary Korean poetry.

Hammad Rind, 2026 Travel Fellow (Urdu, Panjabi, Welsh, Arabic, Persian)

Hammad Rind is a writer, translator, and PhD researcher based in Cardiff. He works across Urdu, Panjabi, Welsh, Persian, Arabic, and English. His translations include works by Naveen Kishore and Najwan Darwish. Author of Four Dervishes, he researches Welsh, Persian, and Urdu elegiac traditions at Bangor University.

Naomi Harris, 2026 Travel Fellow (Hittite)

Naomi Harris brings Hittite texts into English through scholarship and poetry.  She is writing a dissertation on the poetics of Hittite texts at the University of Chicago, where she also works on the Chicago Hittite Dictionary.  Her poetic translations have been published in the Paris Review.

Piera Chen, 2026 Travel Fellow (Chinese)

Piera is an anglophone writer from Hong Kong. She authors travel guides for Lonely Planet. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Narrative, Driftwood Press, Shō Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Her translation of a poem was one of three Highly Commended entries for the 2024 Stephen Spender Prize.

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

  • Elizabeth Chesla
  • Hayden Slentz-Kesler
  • Kate McNamara
  • Lauren Peat
  • Sevana Ohandjanian
  • Wafa Asher Syeda
  • Zhiyuan Mark Ma