Each year, between four and six $1,000 fellowships are awarded to emerging (unpublished or minimally published) translators to help them pay for hotel and travel expenses to the annual ALTA conference.
At the conference, ALTA Fellows are invited to read their translated work at a keynote event, giving them an opportunity to present their translations to an audience of translators, authors, editors, and publishers from around the world. Applications to the ALTA Travel Fellowship are being accepted until April 7, 2017.
The judges for the 2017 ALTA Travel Fellowships are Dick Cluster, Sara Nović, and Sebastian Schulman. Learn more about them below:
Dick Cluster, based in Oakland, California, is editor/translator of the just-released Kill the Ámpaya!: Best Latin American Baseball Fiction. His specialty in Cuban fiction translation includes novels by Mylene Fernández Pintado and Abel Prieto, story collections by Pedro de Jesús and Aida Bahr, and the anthology CUBANA: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women (with Cindy Schuster). Cluster’s translation of Ecuadoran novelist Gabriela Alemán’s Poso Wells will be published by City Lights Books in 2018. He has also translated poetry and scholarship from the Caribbean, Mexico, Colombia, and Spain. In original fiction, he has published a three-book detective series, and in historical nonfiction, The History of Havana (with Rafael Hernández) and They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee.
Sara Nović is the fiction editor at Blunderbuss Magazine and teaches at Columbia University, the New School’s Eugene Lang College, and with the Words After War writing workshop. She holds an MFA from Columbia, where she studied fiction and literary translation, and lives in Brooklyn. Nović was an ALTA Fellow and winner of the Barnstone Literary Translation Prize in 2014. Girl at War, her first novel, is out from Random House and Little, Brown UK, and is forthcoming in thirteen more languages.
Sebastian Schulman is a literary translator from Yiddish, Esperanto, and other languages,
and a PhD candidate in Jewish History at Indiana University. The former director of translation initiatives at the Yiddish Book Center, he regularly teaches course in Yiddish language and culture, and Jewish and Russian history at Hampshire and Smith Colleges. Sebastian’s first book-length translation, of Spomenka Stimec’s Esperanto-language novel Croatian War Nocturnal is due with Phoneme Media in spring 2017.
