Past Award Winners Database

Lauded for her rendition of The Odyssey, Wilson now takes up the earlier epic The Iliad. As in her earlier translation, Wilson renders the classical Greek’s dactylic hexameter into iambic pentameter, the meter in English she thought would best communicate the effect of hearing the poem in ancient times. Wilson’s rendition is highly dramatic and readable, and she returns to the text some of its original renderings, especially the important emotional ...

Robyn Creswell writes that the poet Iman Mersal, “Egypt’s—indeed, the Arab World’s—great outsider poet” finds her politics “not in the public square or at the checkpoint, but rather in the realm of sexual relations, commonplace idioms, and hierarchies of power that are more durable because mostly unacknowledged.” It is in his straightforward, lyrical rendition of such scenarios that the translator succeeds. An abiding skepticism animate...

“William M. Hutchins’ translation of New Waw: Saharan Oasis masterfully channels the poetic rhythms of Ibrahim al-Koni’s tale of a group of Tuareg, struggling with their evolution from a nomadic tribe to a settled community and the tensions that inevitably arise. Legends, fables, prophecies and tribal laws, expressed in lyrical, metaphorical language, give a glimpse into the group’s traditions and the Tuareg mythical paradise oasis, Waw,” said...

This translation of a contemporary Sudanese poet, marries the concision of the short lyric with the lush and ornate tradition of Arabic lyric poetry. Imagistic and sometimes surreal, this combination is exciting precisely because it is perhaps rarer in American and English poetry. Poems like “Panic Attack,” “My Corpse in the River,” and “From the Book of Erasure” demonstrate the juxtaposition of sense and sound these combination of dictions ...

In Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal becomes a detective in search of the Egyptian author Enayat al-Zayyat. Mersal, through Moger, guides us into many archives of an almost-forgotten past—from oral histories to personal journals to library materials to Cairo’s architectural bodies to ultimately a tombstone. A captivating labyrinthine archive itself, made in front of our eyes, Traces of Enayat is not just about Enayat, but also about Mersal and many othe...

Exhausted on the Cross, Najwan Darwish’s second volume of poetry, is poignant, raw, unflinching, and deeply humane, infusing the sorrow and suffering of occupation and the human condition with a startling lyricism. Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s unforgettable translation in its stark, clean, yet melodic register, invites us into the complexity of Darwish’s poetry, the suppleness of his Arabic, and the uncompromising vision of resistance in the face of op...

“No one lies at my side but my sword.”

The longest extant medieval Arabic epic, and the only one named for a woman, tells of Fatima, “She of Noble Ambition.” Captured during a raid and raised in servitude, this adept strategist and fierce fighter nevertheless resists marriage and rises to lead armies across Arabian borderlands with her dark-skinned son. Melanie Magidow’s work here marks a significant achievement in not only translation ...

Set in Aleppo between the 1980s and the early millennium, this novel is a family memoir written from the viewpoint of an adult son. The father has long since left, while the mother and the four grown children struggle to define themselves against various and shifting identities competing for claims over them. The interwoven narrative in the novel shifts from one character to another in an almost dreamlike fashion, almost imperceptibly moving between the...

Humphrey Davies’ masterful translation of Faris al-Shidyaq’s Leg over Leg is the English-language reader’s first introduction to the work of this foundational figure of Arabic letters. The protagonist leaves his native Lebanon to make a life for himself elsewhere as an itinerant scribe, poet, translator, editor, and author. This is a book about books, about conventions of writing, reading, bookmaking, cultural creation and crossings, bristling wit...

This latest translation of Najwan Darwish’s poems offers English-language readers the broadest presentation yet of his crisp, indelible glimpses into the bewildering experience of being an exile in one’s own homeland. Abu-Zeid once again conveys Darwish’s cool, steady tone, while curating poems from seven collections and the past ten years to show us the surprising range in these economical poems of contemporary Palestinian consciousness: “That�...

A dystopian novel about government surveillance and book burning will inevitably bring to mind such classics as 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. Indeed, The Book Censor’s Library features thematic allusions to those works and linguistic clues to match and amplify them. But it also references, aptly if unexpectedly, Zorba the Greek and, as white rabbits appear in unlikely places, Alice in Wonderland. An insightful, engaging tale with surprising twists...

This timely novel offers a moving portrait of Palestinian women across generations, living under occupation and in displacement. Its central figure Jumana uncovers a deep family secret, compelling her to question her Palestinian lineage. Her fragmented memories create a strong narrative thread and in his translation Hazem Jamjoum successfully captures its energy and pacing; he preserves the cultural nuances while making the language of Maya Abu Al-Hayya...

Every now and then a novel cuts through the noise and calls out the truth of the present moment. Omar Khalifah’s Sand-Catcher is that novel, and Barbara Romaine is the translator who brings his wistful story the attention it deserves. With brisk humour and a nuanced view onto the lives of the Palestinian diaspora, the novel follows the travails of four Amman-based journalists tasked with persuading an elderly survivor of the Nakba to share hi...

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s novel is a struggle to form an identity that moves throug...

Ghayath Almadhoun’s I Have Brought You a Severed Hand are war poems for the twentieth-first century, full of rage and wit and terrible truths. He writes of the violence in Syria from the frontlines of immigration in Europe—from self-satisfied Stockholm and the artsy precincts of Berlin—and he brings the news that no one wants to hea...

Life and Political Reality recounts the Bangladesh liberation war through granular neighborhood portraiture, at turns harrowing and humorous, while the novella’s mercurial temporality warns us how yesterday’s banished collaborators can return as tomorrow’s powerful. “Seeing the skulls arrayed over banana leaves, the people … imagined an exquisitely woven jamdani sari … [in which] they saw their mothers and lovers R...

Alternately funny and heartbreaking, this labyrinthine tale—befitting the Minotaur motif at its core—erases time and space to explore what it means to be a sentient being on this planet. The novel is unabashedly non-linear, leading the reader down blind alleys, from Classical antiquity to the twentieth century’s two world wars, with periodic, grim glimpses of life in Soviet Bulgaria. An exercise in the art of story-telling, The Physics of Sorrow ...

This hefty tome, collecting for the first time in English four novels from the 70s and 80s by famed Spanish Royal Academy member Luis Goytisolo, more than meets its match in translator Brendan Riley, whose masterly command in rendering the epic sweep of its prose is everywhere in evidence. Loosely following the post-Civil War coming of age of a Catalan scion whose family sides with Franco’s Nationalists, Goytisolo’s tetralogy employs many of the fam...

Mara Faye Lethem inventively trawls multiple registers of English, literary and streetwise, to recreate the verbal comedy of Besora’s anarchic Cervantine parody of the chronicles of the Conquest. It is a translator’s imaginative transformation of the highest order. The farcical humor and subtle wit of Besora’s Catalan is maintained with narrative verve and playful dialogues that constantly delight and surprise the reader. Lethem identifies every l...

In Irene Solà’s I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, a country home plays host to overlapping generations of the women who have inhabited it, with a sumptuously dark and ghostly ambience that defamiliarizes the modern as capably as it plunges us into the past. Mara Faye Lethem’s translation brilliantly brings this world to...

Replete with folktale, false piety, and real darkness, Irene Solà’s vibrant novel takes place in an old farmhouse in the Catalonian mountains, where an old woman lies dying. The novel jumps in time through hundreds of years as it recounts the stories of the family’s women: the matriarch who made a Faustian deal for a husband only to trick the devil, and the ensuing generations of fallout. Meanwhile, these same women,...

This is Catalan poet Ana Gual’s eighth collection but the first to be translated into English. It is powered by what translator AKaiser calls the “beguiling quotidian”; a world that is at one familiar but strange. Poems are often rooted in the local landscape but simultaneously represent an exploration of language: “I didn’t want a map. / I wanted a machete to clear a path”. Gual offers insights into an intima...

“Lifting my head / I see the moon, // Looking down /I remember home.” So ends the iconic Li Bai poem, here titled “Night Thoughts” by translator Wong May, who observes in her afterword, “The moon was not banal in the Tang Dynasty. In poetry it was primarily the exile’s moon.” Through the assembled poems, which glimmer in the light of Wong May’s poetic mind, and her capacious, inventive essay, she traces (with the help of an erudite rhino...

The Artisans sets us up for heartbreak going in: inevitably, we know, Shen Fuyu’s rural hometown will succumb to the maw of industrialization. What comes as a surprise, however, is the cacophony of joyful detail. Jeremy Tiang’s translation brilliantly captures the tenderness and wit with which Shen writes of this vanishing community and its many trials (present and historic). Tiang leads us deftly through births, deaths, political upheaval, a conspi...

Eric Abrahamsen beautifully renders Duanhuang’s chaotic marathon through Beijing’s unglamorous quarters. This refreshing social critique features a wide array of colorful hustlers dealing in pirated DVDs, fake IDs, and prostitution. Through Duanhuang, we follow the characters’ struggles to rise above their economic conditions as they develop a sense of loyalty and community within a deeply corrupt society. The narrator’s colloquial voice and aut...

With an immediacy sans memory and a bracing vibrancy in new forms, In the Same Light: 200 Poems for Our Century From the Migrants & Exiles of the Tang Dynasty is visionarily rendered from Classical Chinese to contemporary English by the poet Wong May. These ancient poems carve out a pressing and prescient cartography of feelings, be it the keen ears of grief, “the refugees of no camp,” the petty ailments, the dour colors of war, or the long his...

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, first published in Taiwan in 1994, is a queer novel in both senses of the adjective. It tells the story of a “woman who loves women,” while also queering the conventions of the novel to chart a non-linear, non-binary, playfully fragmented, and multi-genre course of its own. Translator Bonnie Huie deftly navigates Qui’s stylistic twists and turn, artfully balancing ontological philosophy against the diction and ...

Jennifer Feeley’s superb translation captures all of the creativity, intellect, and playfulness in the verse of premier Hong Kong poet Xi Xi. In these skillfully wrought and daring poems, Feeley employs all the tools of the English language, including unforced end and internal rhyme, alliteration, wordplay, and references that run the gamut from nursery rhymes and fairy tales to fine art to contemporary politics. In deceptively lighthearted poems such...