2024 mentorships

Click through to read about the mentees and mentors!

Bangla: Sritama Halder with mentor Arunava Sinha

Catalan: Marialena Carr with mentor Julia Sanches

Hindi: Aditya Vikram Shrivastava with mentor Daisy Rockwell

Japanese: Megumi Noda with mentor Takami Nieda

Korean poetry: Dabin Jeong with mentor Jack Jung

Korean prose: Hannah Kim with mentor Janet Hong

Malayalam: Ananthu Sunil with mentor Jayasree Kalathil

Nepali: Rachel Moles with mentor Manjushree Thapa

Non-language-specific, non-genre-specific BIPOC mentorship: Munawwar Abdulla with mentor Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Poetry from a South Asian language: Thila Varghese with mentor Khairani Barokka

Panjabi: Ammara Ahmad with mentor Nirupama Dutt

Polish: Monika Lutostanski with mentor Bill Johnston

Literature from Québec: Sophie Grace Lellman with mentor Madeleine Stratford

Swedish: Miriam Akervall with mentor Rachel Willson-Broyles

Literature from Taiwan: Tony Hao with mentor Steve Bradbury

Tamil: Subhashree Beeman with mentor N Kalyan Raman

Urdu: Poorna Swami with mentor Musharraf Ali Farooqi

 

Funders

The 2024 mentorships are made possible in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the BIPOC Literary Translators Caucus, the Institut Ramon Llull, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, the Polish Cultural Institute New York, the SALT Project, the Swedish Arts Council, the Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, Québec Édition, and the Yanai Initiative.

 

2024 Mentees

Munawwar Abdulla is an emerging Uyghur-to-English translator based in Massachusetts. When not translating, she splits her time between researching brains, Uyghur activism, and community-building work. Her writings have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, The Margins, and others, and she recently co-edited the anthology Under the Mulberry Tree. Learn more about Munawwar here.

 

 

 

Ammara Ahmad
Ammara Ahmad is a writer and journalist from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has appeared in Dawn, The Wire, Scroll, Quint, Indian Express and Malaysiakini. She is a language activist and has been actively promoting Punjabi, which is a dying language in Pakistan. She can be reached as @ammarawrites on Twitter. Learn more about Ammara here.

 

 

 

Miriam Akervall 
Miriam Akervall is a Swedish-American translator and MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Idaho. Their work appears in The Fourth River Literary Journal, Volume Poetry, Voicemail Poems, and elsewhere. They were long listed for the 2023 Frontier Poetry “New Voices” Poetry Prize. They live in Moscow, Idaho. Learn more about Miriam here.

 

 

 

Subhashree Beeman
Subhashree Beeman is a US-based literary and commercial translator working in the languages Tamil, French, Spanish, and English. She was born and raised in Chennai, India. Through the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship, she will be translating her first book-length work from Tamil under the guidance of Mr. Kalyan Raman. Learn more about Subhashree here.

 

 

 

Marialena Carr 
Marialena Carr was born ninety-seven kilometers south of Barcelona and now lives due north from NYC. After half a lifetime as a research oceanographer, she turned to writing and translation. Her translations from the Catalan can be found in Hyperion and Metamorphoses, and El Jo-Ull/The I-Eye by Vicenç Altaió. Learn more about Marialena here.

 

 

 

Sritama Halder 
Sritama Halder is the Reading Facilitator at a Kolkata-based high school by day and a translator by night. As the Reading Facilitator, her job is to initiate her students into book-reading. As a translator, she translates academic articles from English to Bangla for CASI, University of Pennsylvania. Learn more about Sritama here.

 

 

 

Tony Hao 
Tony Hao is a translator and writer based in Connecticut. He is a recent graduate of Yale University, where he majored in English and studied fiction writing, journalism, and literary translation. Under the guidance of his mentor Steve Bradbury, he will translate contemporary prose written in Taiwanese Mandarin. Learn more about Tony here.

 

 

 

Dabin Jeong 
Dabin Jeong (they/them|they/she) is a poet and translator from Seoul, South Korea. Their works have appeared or are forthcoming in DIALOGIST, Salt Hill Journal, The Maine Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Indiana Review, and Chogwa. They are an MFA in Poetry candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Learn more about Dabin here.

 

 

 

Hannah Kim  
Hannah Kim is a writer and translator based in Seoul, South Korea. She has a MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University and is currently receiving her MA in Korean-English interpretation from Ewha Womens University. She leads literary seminars on Korean translated fiction at Literary Arts. Learn more about Hannah here.

 

 

 

Sophie Grace Lellman 
Sophie Grace Lellman is bookseller, publicist, and editor based in New York City, where she works for two translation-focused indie presses. She received her MA in Comparative Literature from King’s College London in 2022. She will be translating her first book-length project with the support of the ALTA mentorship. Learn more about Sophie here.

 

 

 

Monika Lutostanski 
Monika Lutostanski is a Polish-American translator, linguist, and astrologer. Born and raised in Vermont, USA, she currently resides in London, UK, but calls Kraków, Poland, home. Having studied Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia, she translates from both Polish and Russian into English. Learn more about Monika here.

 

 

 

Rachel Moles is a novice translator from England who also writes and acts. She was based in Kathmandu, Nepal between 2012 and Covid, where she taught English, worked for development organizations, and made some forays into film and theatre. She will be translating a Nepali novel into English. Learn more about Rachel here.

 

 

 

 

Megumi Noda is a Japanese-to-English and English-to-Japanese literary translator based in Tokyo, Japan. She is a 2024 mentee in ALTA’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Program. Learn more about Megumi here.

 

 

 

 

Aditya Vikram Shrivastava  
Aditya Vikram is a writer, translator, and emerging scholar from Lucknow, India. Currently a teaching fellow in the English department at Ashoka University, they are interested in questions of language, regionality, postcolonialism, performance, and gender. Their critical and creative literary work has been published by Goethe Institute, British Council, Agents of Ishq, and Gulmohur Quarterly, among others. Learn more about Aditya here.

 

 

 

Ananthu Sunil  
Ananthu Sunil is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in English, while working as a freelance translator on the side. Ananthu is also a rapper and songwriter, working hard to garner attention for his songs, which blend English and Malayalam lyrics. Learn more about Ananthu here.

 

 

 

Poorna Swami
Poorna Swami is a writer, poet, and choreographer from Bangalore, India. She received the 2018 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, and also the 2023 Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu translation. Currently, she is a PhD student in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Learn more about Poorna here.

 

 

 

Thila Varghese 
Thila Varghese lives in Canada, where she works part time during the academic year as a Senior Writing Advisor at Western University. Her translations of Tamil literary works have been published in international journals and magazines. Thila’s translation entry was shortlisted in the 2023 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation. Learn more about Thila here.

 

 

 

2024 Mentors

Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is an Egyptian-American translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world who translates from Arabic, French, and German. He has received the Sarah Maguire Prize for poetry in translation, an NEA translation grant, PEN Center USA’s translation prize, Poetry Magazine‘s translation prize, a Fulbright research fellowship, and translation residencies from the Lannan Foundation and the Banff International Center for the Arts, among other honors. He is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice. The online hub for his work is http://www.kareemjamesabuzeid.com.

 

 

 

Musharraf Ali Farooqi is an author, novelist, and translator. He is an international authority on Urdu classical literature, and the founder of the Library of Urdu Classics (urduclassics.com) and Urdu Thesaurus (urduthesaurus.com). He is also the founder of Storykit, a program that uses stories to educate children. Web: micromaf.com

 

 

 

Khairani Barokka is Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), and a writer and artist from Jakarta, with around twenty-five years of professional translation experience. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centers disability justice as anticolonial praxis, and access as translation. Among her honors, she has been MPT’s Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, an Artforum Must-See, and Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing. Okka’s books include Indigenous Species, Rope, and Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (as co-editor). Her latest is Ultimatum Orangutan, shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.

 

 

Steve Bradbury translates the work of contemporary Chinese-language poets. His last book-length publication, Raised by Wolves: Poems and Conversations (Deep Vellum), won the 2020 PEN America Poetry in Translation Award.

 

 

 

 

 

Nirupama Dutt is a well-known poet, journalist, columnist, and translator, writing in both English and Punjabi, as well as occasionally in Hindi. She received the Punjabi Akademi Award for her anthology of poems, Ik Nadi Sanwali Jahi (A Stream Somewhat Dark). Her poetry anthologies in English and Hindi are: The Black Woman and Buri Auraton Ki Fehrist Se. Her poems have been translated into many languages and included in several anthologies. Her books include Stories of the Soil (translation of 41 stories from Punjabi, published by Penguin) and Poet of the Revolution (translation of the memoirs and poetry of Lal Singh Dil, published by Penguin). 

 

 

Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. She received the TA First Translation Prize and the LTI Korea Translation Award for her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale. She’s a two-time winner of the Harvey Award for Best International Book for her translations of Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass and Yeong-shin Ma’s Moms. Recent translations include Kwon Yeo-sun’s Lemon and Ha Seong-nan’s Bluebeard’s First Wife.

 

 

 

 

Bill Johnston received the 2019 National Translation Award in Poetry for his rendering of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic narrative poem in rhyming couplets Pan Tadeusz (Archipelago Books, 2018). He translates from Polish and French; his recent translations have included work by Julia Fiedorczuk, Kaja Malanowska, Jean Giono, and Jeanne Benameur. His numerous honors include the PEN Translation Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches literary translation at Indiana University, where he is currently serving as Michael Henry Heim Chair in Central and East European Letters.

 

 

Jack Jung studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books 2020), the winner of 2021 MLA Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. His poetry and translations have been published in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, BOMB Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, Chicago Review, Guernica Magazine, The Margins, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He teaches at Davidson College. 

 

 

 

Dr. Jayasree Kalathil is the author of The Sackclothman, a children’s book which has been translated into Malayalam, Telugu, and Hindi. She has received the V. Abdulla Memorial Translation Prize (for Sheela Tomy’s Valli), the JCB Prize for Literature (for S. Hareesh’s Moustache), and the Crossword Books Jury Award for Indian Language Translation (for N Prabhakaran’s Diary of a Malayali Madman). She has published widely in the area of anti-racism and human rights in mental health, including Recovery and Resilience: African, African-Caribbean and South Asian Women’s Stories and the co-authored textbook Values and Ethics in Mental Health. Originally from Kerala, India, Jayasree lives in the New Forest in England.

 

 

Takami Nieda is a two-time winner of the Freeman Book Award for YA Literature for her translations of GO by Kazuki Kaneshiro and The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart by Chesil. She is currently working on Travelers of a Hundred Years by Lee Hoesung, forthcoming from University of Michigan Press in 2024. Nieda teaches writing and multilingual translation at Seattle Central College.

 

 

 

 

N Kalyan Raman is a translator of Tamil fiction and poetry into English. He has published 15 works of translated fiction and over 200 poems by leading Tamil poets in journals and anthologies in India and abroad. The Story of a Goat, his translation of Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020. He was recipient of the Translation Prize (English) for 2022 given by the Central Academy of Letters in India. He lives and works in the port city of Chennai in south India.

 

 

 

Daisy Rockwell is an artist and translator living in Vermont, USA. She has translated numerous twentieth century classics into English from Hindi and Urdu, including Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, and Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard. Her translation of Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There was awarded the 2019 Aldo and Jeannie Scaglioni for Translation of a Literary Work, and her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand was awarded the 2022 International Booker Prize as well as the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

 

 

 

Julia Sanches translates literature from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan into English. Her recent translations include Boulder by Eva Baltasar, which was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arunava Sinha is a literary translator, working from Bengali into English and English into Bengali. More than 80 of his translations have been published so far across India, the UK, the US, and Australia. He teaches in the Creative Writing Department of Ashoka University in India, and is Co-Director, Ashoka Centre for Translation. He lives and works in New Delhi.

 

 

 

 

Madeleine Stratford is a poet, a literary translator and an Associate Professor at Université du Québec en Outaouais. Her translations have been shortlisted for the Governor General award in Canada (2016, 2019, 2021), as well as for the Young Readers Kirkus Prize in the US (2017). Her recent work includes Québécois classic Swallowed [L’Avalée des avalés] by Réjean Ducharme (Véhicule Press, 2020) and Canadian bestseller Chasseurs d’étoiles [Hunting by Stars] by Métis writer Cherie Dimaline (Boréal, 2023).

 

 

 

Manjushree Thapa is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction centered on contemporary Nepal. She has also translated Nepali literature into English, most recently Indra Bahadur Rai’s modern classic There’s a Carnival Today, set in Darjeeling’s separatist movement. She translated the works of 49 Nepali poets and writers in The Country is Yours, and has guest edited collections of Nepali literature in translation for Manoa, La.Lit, and Words Without Borders. She has a Master’s in English from the University of Washington, where she was a Fulbright fellow, and a DLitt (Honorary) from Western University. She is currently working on a novel.

 

 

 

Rachel Willson-Broyles is a freelance translator specializing in translating contemporary literature from Swedish to English. She received her BA in Scandinavian Studies from Gustavus Adolphus College in 2002 and her PhD in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. Recent translations include Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius and Blaze Me a Sun by Christoffer Carlsson. Rachel lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.