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. 2020 marks the twenty-second year of the NTA and the sixth 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 20, 2020.
We are honored to present this year’s judges, Amaia Gabantxo, Emmanuel D. Harris II, and William Maynard Hutchins. Learn about them below:
Amaia Gabantxo is a writer, singer and literary translator specialized in Basque literature—a pioneer in the field and its most prolific contributor. Her most recent translations include Kirmen Uribe & Jon Cazenave’s collaborative photo-poetic art book Gale, Miren Agur Meabe’s A Glass Eye, Harkaitz Cano’s Twist and Gabriel Aresti’s two poetry collections Downhill and Rock & Core, which earned her the 2018 Kutxa Laboral Literary Translation Prize. She is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and founding member of the Third Coast Translators Collective. She collaborated with the artist Jenny Holzer in her 2019 Bilbao Guggenheim retrospective, translating her Inflammatory Essays and Truisms into Basque, and helping curate a selection of Basque poetry to project onto the museum’s facade. A multidisciplinary artist, in 2019 she released the album KANTUZ: 1931. She is currently writing a novel in flamenco form.
Emmanuel D. Harris II, Ph.D., is a Professor of Spanish and Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the award-winning English translator of the Afro-Peruvian novel Malambo by Lucía Charún-Illescas and also the translator of the collection of short stories Over the Waves and Other Stories / Sobre las olas y otros cuentos by the Afro-Cuban writer Inés María Martiatu, which was a featured selection of the Cervantes Institute in Chicago. In 1996 he was awarded Teacher of the Year at Washington University and has been honored to have a service award established in his name in 2000 at Baker University where he formerly instructed.
William Maynard Hutchins has translated numerous works of Arabic literature into 
English including Return of the Spirit by Tawfiq al-Hakim, The Cairo Trilogy by Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and The Fetishists by Ibrahim al-Koni. His translation of New Waw by al-Koni won the ALTA National Prose Translation Award in 2015. He received National Endowment for the Arts grants for literary translation in 2006, 2012, and 2020. He studied at Yale University and the University of Chicago and taught at the Gerard School, Sidon, Lebanon, the University of Ghana, the American University in Cairo, and Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina.
Important update: As of this year, the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose, previously open only to translators with U.S. citizenship or residence, will now accept submissions of translations from translators of any nationality. We only accept submissions from publishers for this award via our Submittable portal. Submit by April 20!