November 11, 2023—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2023 Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award (SUFTA). This prize, which was inaugurated in 2022, is offered by the American Literary Translators Association in conjunction with the Spain-USA Foundation. The award recognizes translations into English of literary prose works written originally by authors of Spanish (Spain) nationality. The 2023 judges are Lisa Dillman, Tiago Miller, and Gary Racz.
This year’s winner was announced at the Awards Ceremony held during ALTA’s 46th annual conference, ALTA46: The Place of Translation, held in Tucson, AZ from November 8-11, 2023. The ceremony, held on Saturday, November 11, included a spotlight on the 2023 shortlist. The winner received a plaque by presenting judge Gary Racz, and a short reading followed by the translator from the winning text. The winner will be awarded a $5,000 prize.
Winner: 2023 Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award (SUFTA)
Antagony
By Luis Goytisolo
Translated from Spanish by Brendan Riley
Dalkey Archive Press
This is what the judges had to say about the winner:
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 familiar hallmarks of Modernist prose, veering from subjective realism to bildungsroman to memoir to stream-of-consciousness, all handled deftly and surely in Riley’s truly impressive—even monumental—rendering. Riley displays an unmistakable talent and remarkable endurance combined.
About the winner:
Native of Dunkirk, New York, Californian since 1977, Brendan Riley has also lived in New Jersey, London, and Barcelona, Spain. Secondary school teacher of English and Spanish since 1994. ATA Certified Translator, with degrees in English from Santa Clara University and Rutgers University, and certificates in translation studies from UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Brendan has translated writing from Spanish to English by authors such as Fernando Aramburu, Álvaro Enrigue, Juan Filloy, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Gómez Bárcena, Luis Goytisolo, Carmen Grau, Julián Herbert, Carlos Robles Lucena, Eloy Tizón, and Pedro Plaza Salvati.
[Image description: Brendan is a clean-shaven white middle-aged blue-eyed Irish-American man with the complexion of boiled shrimp, his grayed-out red-brown hair whiffling in the April breeze, and a contented, dimpled smile on his lips. He’s dressed in the finest middle-class leisure comfort clothing money could buy twenty years ago.]
The 2024 Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award submissions portal will be opened in January 2024.