The ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program is designed to facilitate and establish a close working relationship between an experienced translator and an emerging translator on a project selected by the emerging translator. The mentorship duration is approximately one year. The emerging translator is expected to choose a project that can be completed in a year’s time, and they will only be advised on that particular project.

This week we are excited to feature Marian Schwartz, this year’s Russian prose mentor:

Marian Schwartz is a freelance translator of classic and contemporary Russian fiction as well as history, criticism, and fine arts. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and translated the New York Times’ bestseller The Last Tsar, by Edvard Radzinsky, as well as classics by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Goncharov, Yuri Olesha, Mikhail Lermontov, and Leo Tolstoy. Her most recent publication is Andrei Gelasimov’s Into the Thickening Fog (AmazonCrossing); forthcoming are Leonid Yuzefovich’s Horsemen of the Sands (Archipelago), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel: March 1917, Volumes 1 & 2 (University of Notre Dame Press), Polina Dashkova’s Madness Treads Lightly (AmazonCrossing), and Olga Slavnikova’s The Man Who Couldn’t Die (Russian Library, Columbia University Press). She is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association and the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships, as well as numerous awards, including the 2014 Read Russia Prize for Contemporary Russian Literature and the 2016 Soeurette Diehl Frasier Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. www.marianschwartz.com

If you are interested in finding out more about ALTA’s Emerging Translator Mentorship program and the other mentors, please check out our website and blog. If you are interested in applying, please see our online portal.

(Please be advised that if you wish to apply for a mentorship with a project in Russian poetry, you are encouraged to apply for the non-language-specific poetry mentorship with Steven Bradbury.)