Past Award Winners Database

Balam Rodrigo gives voice to dead Central American migrants. They recount their hopes, dreams, and atrocities endured as they cross Mexico hoping to reach the United States. These accounts are mingled with excerpts from the 1842 book by Friar Bartolomé de las Casas’: A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Translator Dan Bellm uses clashing registers: archaic English for de las Casas, contemporary English for the voices of the dead, a few S...

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 ...

There is no doubt that Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a fundamental document of Western literature, virtually the source book for Graeco-Roman mythology. However, most translations of it into English do not capture its poetry, wit, subversive nature, and extravagant literary devices. C. Luke Soucy’s translation deftly conveys all of these. The gods are presented in all their power and cruelty. In particular, a rape is a rape. Soucy’s strict, line-for-l...

These poems are simply extraordinary. Imagine broken lines that are indebted to both the Grimm Brothers’ “Hansel and Gretel” and to an epigraph by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, a 19th century German poet, that become a love poem in shape of a hot-air balloon, which ends in a tercet-sized basket that also contains the title: we were here / you were propane / & I your flame. None of Ulrike Almut Sandig’s similarly playful approaches, some for...

These poems, written “on the edge of a precipice or on a flooding deck of a ship,” come to us from a poet living in Ukraine. Although they speak on behalf of all who live with the challenge of surviving under perilous conditions, they are more than simply poems of witness, since they are equally committed to marveling at the persistence of love and light despite those conditions. They arrive like bottles thrown into a faraway sea that inexplicably f...

How does one write a sick body that is fast declining, in a state of mind lost in many pasts crumpled together with little grounding in the present moment? By the Rivers of Babylon is a heartbreaking rendition of one such experience that allows us to be with/within the man on the hospital bed, instead of reading about him. In a circular and yet chronological literary style that is at once lucid and hallucinatory, Lobo Antunes, via Jull Costa, offers us ...

Kairos is a story of breakup and repair – an epic exploration of love, brutality, secrecy and destruction at both individual and international scales. The torsions of a messy love affair meet the fall of the Berlin Wall in spiraling, tangling ways; these themes aren’t untrodden ground, but Erpenbeck and Hofmann tread them with such original, surprising, profound feet that they’re revealed anew. Kairos is stunningly bleak and ferociously beautiful ...

The Liar opens with a winter fog that lends a monochromatic grayness to the physical as well as the grief-infused emotional landscape of Sand Island. But the mist is quickly pulled back to reveal the richness of the island’s terrain and inhabitants. The translation perfectly renders the narrator’s voice: a man who pretends to be the ironic outside observer but who sympathizes with the islanders more than he wants to admit. The translation beauti...

In beautiful prose, the journalistic vignettes making up This Is Not Miami explore how the poetry of life in Veracruz, Mexico, is destroyed by unpoetic reality. Melchor’s compassionate stories of everyday people confronting government corruption, officially-sanctioned drug-trafficking, and daily violence underscore how the only beauty left is that of language. Hughes’ sensitive translation maintains the musicality of the various voices doing the sto...

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...

With The World at My Back, author Thomas Melle takes us into the harrowing world of bipolar disorder, chronicling the effect it has had on him and his relationships. Yet he does this with such remarkable aplomb that the reader now laughs, now cries at his predicament. As an author, playwright, and translator, Melle is very much embedded in the cultural life of a German writer, and it is against that backdrop that the episodes swing from manic to depress...

Tankas are 5/7/5/7/7 syllable-count poems, which Tatsuhiko Ishii collapses into a single line and composes into sequences, each leading to or broken by the next. His often homoerotic poetry mingles Eastern and Western ideas and allusions in startling ways: The Book of Genji, The Waste Land, The Inferno, Yukio Mishima, and the Bible jostle with each other, often asyntactically, as translator Hiroaki Sato artfully conveys. Sato does not follow the syllabl...

It’s not surprising that the poems of Wendy Guerra, who grew up, was educated, and worked in television and film in Cuba, are filled with the language of travel: leaving, letting go, rowing, capsizing, abandoning, (the bottomless) suitcase, goodbye, far away. The myriad ways in which the speaker delights in transgressing is surprising. The poems frequently step over the dotted line between the public and private self, which is a convincing argument th...

This translation by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard magnificently mimics the clotted wordplay and knotted rhymes of Amelia Rosselli’s free verse. They also follow the Surrealist and Symbolist techniques and the incantatory repetitions with which Rosselli investigates religion, love, the self, justice, and injustice. Second-rate Surrealists baffle with unredeemed nonsense. Rosselli, in the hands of her translators, startles with unexpected connec...

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 ...

On the surface, these poems by the Polish poet, translator, and literary critic, Jerzy Jarniewicz, may seem “user friendly,” in both senses of the word—“appealing” and “easy to understand.” Afterall, diction-wise, they’re consistently colloquial, and their frequent gesturing to contemporary culture—ATM, GPS, Youporn—makes them feel laidback and inclusive. Beneath the surface, however, using his ever-sharp wit and keen intelligence, t...

In long and limber lines, Juan Calzadilla unravels the metropolitan energy of Caracas. The poems (sometimes in justified prose, but more frequently lineated) eschew all punctuation besides the occasional mid-line caesura. This formal quality, combined with the poems explorations of what might be considered the grittier or coarser side of urban life, gives the book a kinetic energy that has its own mimetic impact. The poems of The Roof of the Whale are c...

At last, Jenny McPhee has beautifully restored this decadent, sprawling novel by a giant of Italian literature. An infamously pared-down version was all we had of the novel in English until now, perhaps since Morante’s impressive range of voices, tones, and forms requires its own kind of sorcery—difficult to achieve at all, let alone in a book of this scope and length. Yet McPhee renders the baroque glitter of Morante’s language and the muscle ben...

Ali Farah’s bildungsroman tells the story of Yabar, a young black Roman, and his coming of age in a multilingual and multiracial Rome that nonetheless presents significant obstacles to his sense of self and belonging. Hope Campbell Gustafson’s skilled translation seamlessly shifts between Yabar’s colloquial speech and the poetic grandeur of Somali-inspired tales passed on through generations. The result is a vibrant, fresh, and timeless novel that...

In bold, digressive prose, Her Side of the Story powerfully explores the intersections between the personal, the domestic, and the political. Its narrator, Alessandra, leads us through a shifting maze of a childhood and young adulthood in Rome under fascist rule. Jill Foulston vividly renders the nuances of Alessandra’s experience, capturing De Cespedes’s deeply introspective language in lucid, gripping English. Once censored for her work, De Cesped...

Dialect is a perennial challenge for translators, and this portrait of domestic brutality and frustrated artistic ambition is riddled with it: a Neapolitan that in the mouth of the narrator’s father becomes as creative and violent as the character himself. Oonagh Stransky demonstrates her expertise by retaining the original often enough to help readers develop a feel for the regional language, then rendering the rest in a knife-like English that is vu...

This unsettling, unforgettable Tamil novel about a seemingly respectable man who runs a cartel of beggars finds beauty, humor, and insight in the most difficult places. Originally published in 2003 and adapted into a 2009 film, Jeyamohan’s narrative is harrowing yet luminous, distilling the rawness of lived experience into a wrenching meditation on survival, violence, cruelty, and the ironies of how certain bodies are marginalized and rendered at once...

Dmitri Manin’s impressive transcreations reveal—and revel in—the formal architecture of Zabolotsky’s first book of poems, an inscrutable classic of the Russian avant-garde animated by an outsider sensibility and an absurdist worldview beyond programmatic politics. Manin vividly conveys the vertiginous metaphors and radical juxtapositions of Zabolotsky’s poems while using rhyme and meter in fresh and surprising ways to capture their beautifully...

Victor Heringer was a Río de Janeiro wunderkind, a poet, sound and video artist, translator, maker of digital books and novelist, at home among the Internet’s “irreverent absurdities and chaotic pathways of association” (Charlie Lee). His 2016 novel reassembles, from fragments of memory, sensory experience, and sudden revelation, a brief love between two adolescent boys, Camilo and Cosme, in a fictional suburb during the summer of 19...

Zuzanna Ginczanka spent her short life stateless, but the poems she left behind act as a passport, transporting readers into a world of dreams, thoughts and feeling only Ginczanka could create. Like the centaur itself, On Centaurs & Other Poems, seeks its own radical hybridity—pushing together the playful and political, the pastoral and the prescient, with electrifying neologisms (i.e. “brainpulpish”), multilayered metaphors, and syntactical ...

Decapitated Poetry is the glorious new collection of selected works by Ko-hua Chen, Taiwan’s first openly-gay poet. Chen’s poetry achieves transcendence through a daring combination of depth, revelation and lightheartedness. Playfully filthy at times, gently mocking at others, Chen’s humor and vulnerability come through in poems like “Song of Dumbbells,” “The Necessity of Anal Sex,” “Twelve Love Poems for an Android.” Co-translators We...

A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist vividly captures Hong Kong through a time-lapse of language: the reader feels the city’s slowly-shifting, changing landscape in each poem. Derek Chung is one of Hong Kong’s acclaimed living poets, his wide lines and architectural stanzas give a quiet, cozy warmth to the collection. May Huang’s English-language voice for Chung is precise and crisp, with moments of deep sadness and nostalgia. Huang meets each poe...

Don Mee Choi soars to the edges of the English language and back in her mesmerizing and unsettling translation of Kim Hyesoon’s “bird language” in Phantom Pain Wings. In Kim’s “I-do-bird” sequence, we traverse the landscape of collective grief and trauma, of systemic violence and Sisyphean resistance to power, through overlapping contemporary and historic voices that speak in puns and homonyms. Breathlessly, we witness the coalescence of nou...

To read Wago Ryoichi’s Since Fukushima is to wake up in a hall of mirrors. Not the kind Bruce Lee enters in Enter the Dragon. In Halebsky & Takahashi’s astounding translation of Wago’s world, the mirrors face the walls, while their opaque sides stare at you. And while in Bruce Lee’s room you would be lost among your doppelgangers, in Wago’s you will be alone. This is not to say he has wrought a language of nihilism. Quite ...

Mothers Don’t, in Katie Whittemore’s stellar translation, is at once a poignant feminist commentary on motherhood, misogyny, and societal expectations through the ages; and a gripping novel about a woman writing a novel—the one we’re reading—about a woman who drowned her ten-month-old twins. Was it insanity? Pure evil? “How could she?” society, the press, and the courtroom cry. Herein lie any number of answers to that question, each of the...

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...

Rivas’ fast-moving, non-linear novel leads the reader through an array of historical moments and geographical locations, its pages brimming with eccentric and slightly sinister characters. While the novel’s narrator has his feet firmly on Galician soil, his head floats through an eclectic personal history, recounting tales of war, political repression and resistance, rock music, and recreational drug-taking in pre-Transition Spain. Rogers’ flowing...

Little wonder Irene Vallejo’s El infinito en un junco, the only nonfiction source text on the 2023 SUFTA shortlist, should boast over 50 printings in the five years since its publication. Her delightful, accessible historical study provides a grand tour de force of the origin of books in classical times. Papyrus, Charlotte Whittle’s superb rendering, displays an erudite literacy few translators possess and an immense gift for nuanced phrasing. How e...

Gómez de Avellaneda’s 1842 Two Women is a sweeping lyrical tale of love and lust, and a devastating diatribe against the straitjacket imposed by marriage and gender. A love triangle entangling a bold, gorgeous young Countess who throws caution to the wind, the naïve young Sevillian who enchants her, and his virtuous wife, the novel lays bare what results from female agency in 19th-century Spain, but also resonates into the present. The intricacies o...

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...

The premise of Chinatown promises claustrophobia: a Vietnamese woman trapped in the Paris metro by a suspect package, possibly a bomb. Thuận’s novel, though, brought to us by Nguyễn An Lý’s sweeping, melodic phrasing, is anything but sedentary: who knew reverie could be this fast-moving, this suspenseful? Below the surface, waiting, feeling the uneasy gaze of her fellow Parisians, our narrator travels back through her memories—of her son, of ...

Sean Gasper Bye’s crisp phrasing renders in poignant English Grynberg’s tales of missed connections and disconnection. Here, whole lives seem to shift within pithy sentences—between sentences, even. These brief stories mesmerize with vignettes and short sharp phrases whose truth exceeds an all-too-neat binary of fiction/nonfiction. With a photographer’s eye and a historian’s gift for teasing out patterns, Grynberg tempts us into a rapprochemen...

So Distant from My Life asks us to reckon with what we think about when we think about queerness, NGOs, white saviors and, perhaps most of all, what it means to leave—and then to come back, and come back, and come back again. Early on, Ilboudo’s resourceful protagonist declares himself in possession of a “vagabond mind” that leaps like “a young goat released from its tether”, and Yarri Kamara’s translation perfectly channels this thrilling...

“Art,” we are told in a soaring sibilant-filled monologue by László Krasznahorkai’s narrator, an unhinged plantar fasciitis-plagued Manhattan librarian named herman melvill (not, he insists, to be confused with the uppercased-and-ending-with-an-e author of Moby-Dick), “provides shade from the sweltering heat [or] splits the sky, where, in that shade’s shelter … every single particle … becomes something other than its surroundings.” her...

All twelve raw, deeply moving stories in this collection capture the tales of real people wrestling to find and hold on to innate goodness, desperately seeking light in the depths of darkness and striving for a higher sense of purpose and state of being. From tending to animals in a forest to begging a publisher for payment that is rightfully due, scenes are electric in nature and cinematic in feel, engraving a lasting impression on the reader. In this ...

Set in the forested mountains of northern Kerala, Valli—a multigenerational chronicle—is a novelized adaptation of the diary that Susan, an architect, leaves her daughter Tessa. Exploratory in form—encompassing, inter alia, letters, folk songs, and poems—the story is as much about a family and the inhabitants of Kalluvayal as it is about the proximate ancient trees, flora, and quick-flowing Kabani river. Social and cultural histories intermingle...

The book’s first two lines—“Inside these articulations / the beginnings of language”—describe the poet and translator’s achievement in this formally diverse but coherent collection whose titular insect recurs throughout. Sneeden’s translations of Giannisi’s prose poems, entirely devoid of punctuation, exhibit his skill at precise pacing, using both syntax and sound. The poet’s sparse lyrics find a welcome home in Sneeden’s pithy Engl...

Joshua Weiner’s formidable translations reveal Nelly Sachs as a powerful visionary poet, transcending her revered reputation as a “Holocaust poet.” Flight and Metamorphosis is a collection “where mystical artifice and natural objects join; where biblical prophecy and individual vision fuse; where concrete images transform with surrealistic fluidity…” Weiner grapples throughout with the sense of Geheimnis—the mystery, the secret, the deep d...

“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...

Lebanese-French author Vénus Khoury-Ghata invents a fabulist realm, lyrically rendered by Marilyn Hacker, a village where daily life plays out among the “water people,” their words and silences, and feathers, fire, wolves, bees, and, crucially, trees. Hacker locates the village, in part, in Khoury-Ghata’s mother’s village of Bcharré, and notes the way “Lebanese Arabic, with its own history, its music, its proverbs” infuses Khoury-Ghata’s...

In When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me, the night speaks “with a blade / That slices / Into the places of certainty.” Mauritian writer Ananda Devi, a major figure in Indian Ocean letters, considers how language perpetuates or resists abuses of power; without poetry, words can “die a slow death,” “squandering our voices our votes our convictions.” Kazim Ali’s musical and somehow intimate performance of Devi’s work brings forth a vital po...

To read The Antarctica of Love is to feel at the mercy of emotion: of sorrow, longing, horror, hopelessness, awe at the astonishing beauty of the writing. A nameless murdered woman lingers in this world, an unwilling witness to the mostly predictable events that occur after her death. As she attempts to untether herself, and to quiet the voices that still “[crawl] like insects in the place where [her] heart once was,” she recounts her past—in part...

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...

Jamie Chang’s translation of Concerning My Daughter is a lapidary mapping of a woman’s courage as she negotiates shifting fissures that threaten her being. Can she dissipate the darkness of shame and accept her queer daughter? How to rescue the patient she looks after from inhumane corporate eldercare? “I am standing in the middle of it all… I haven’t caved in or fallen down.” Kim Hye-jin’s urgent tale of intern...

In this absurdist, sci-fi, short-story collection—which runs the gamut from a mother traveling

to Vietnam to seek answers about her son’s suicide, to a nun yearning to once more lead a

life imbued with purpose—queerness is at once the anchor and a gateway to so much more.

Tiffany Tsao’s masterful translation, evident in how the pulsing language soars off the page,

is a rhythmical yet tender pastiche of twelve scenario...