The National Translation Award is awarded annually in poetry and in prose to literary translators who have made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality. The NTA is the only prize for a work of literary translation into English to include an evaluation of the source language text. 2019 marks the twenty-first year of the NTA and the fifth year in which the NTA is awarded separately in poetry and prose. Submissions for the National Translation Award in Prose are being accepted until April 15, 2019.
We are honored to present this year’s judges, Bonnie Huie, Charlotte Mandell, and Jeffrey Zuckerman. Learn about them below:
Credit: An Rong Xu
Bonnie Huie is a translator of Chinese and Japanese. Her translation of Notes of a Crocodile by Taiwanese lesbian countercultural icon Qiu Miaojin won the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize. She is the past recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Her rendition of Motojirō Kajii’s poem “Under the Cherry Blossoms” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her translations of political fiction by Tatsuhiro Ōshiro and Takiji Kobayashi can be found in the Brooklyn Rail. She lives in New York.
Credit: Tim Davis
Charlotte Mandell has translated over forty books, including works by Maurice Blanchot, Jonathan Littell, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Her translation of Compass by Mathias Enard received ALTA’s National Translation Award in Prose in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017. Her translation of Enard’s Zone received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2010. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the poet Robert Kelly.
Credit: Rachel Caplan
Jeffrey Zuckerman is a New York–based translator of French books, from Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins and Antoine Volodine’s Radiant Terminus to the Dardenne brothers’ diaries and Jean Genet’s The Criminal Child. His shorter writings and translations have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, The White Review, and VICE. A member of the Cedilla & Co, translators’ collective he was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for his ongoing work on the short stories of Hervé Guibert.