October 26, 2024—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Italian Prose in Translation Award. Starting in 2015, the Italian Prose in Translation Award (IPTA) recognizes the importance of contemporary Italian prose (fiction and literary non-fiction) and promotes the translation of Italian works into English. This year’s judges are Johanna Bishop, Isabella Corletto, and Diana Thow.
This year’s winner was announced at the Awards Ceremony held during ALTA’s 47th annual conference, ALTA47: Voices in Translation, held in Milwaukee, WI from October 25-28, 2024. The ceremony, held on Saturday, October 26, included a spotlight on the 2024 shortlist. Presenting judge Isabella Corletto conferred the prize on Diana Thow, who accepted the award on behalf of the winner, who could not be in attendance. She read a short statement and reading selected from the winning title. The winner will be awarded a $5,000 prize and a commemorative plaque.
Winner: 2024 Italian Prose in Translation Award
Lies and Sorcery
By Elsa Morante
Translated by Jenny McPhee
New York Review Books | Penguin Classics UK (forthcoming)
This is what the judges had to say about the winner:
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 beneath its dry, smooth coils. The rhythm of her translation dances—backwards and in heels, without a misstep—across nearly eight hundred pages, through melodrama, romance, poetry, picaresque humor and psychological suspense. Thanks to McPhee, Lies and Sorcery now has the English version it deserves.
About the winner
Jenny McPhee is a novelist and translator of Italian works by Anna Banti, Massimo Bontempelli, Cristina Campo, Fausta Cialente, Beppe Fenoglio, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, Anna Maria Ortese, Curzio Malaparte, Paolo Maurensig, and Pope John Paul II. She is an Associate Clinical Professor at NYU where she teaches courses in literary Translation, creative writing, and contemporary global literature. She has also taught at Princeton University and the European School of Literary Translation. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.
Image description: Jenny, a white woman with shoulder length blonde hair, is wearing pearl earrings, a grey pearl necklace and a black v-neck shirt. She is seated against a light grey backdrop, is at a three quarters angle to the camera, and is smiling. The photograph was taken by her very good friend, the photographer Lina Bertucci.
The 2025 Italian Prose in Translation Award submissions portal will be opened in January 2025.