The National Translation Award (NTA) 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 considers translations from translators of any nationality. The NTA is the only prize for a work of literary translation into English to include an evaluation of the source language text. 2022 marks the twenty-fourth year of the NTA and the eighth year in which the NTA is awarded separately in poetry and prose. Submissions for the National Translation Award in Poetry are being accepted until April 18, 2022.

We are honored to spotlight this year’s National Translation Award in Poetry judges, Hélène Cardona, Boris Dralyuk, and Archana Venkatesan. Learn about them below:

Hélène Cardona’s bilingual collections include Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves (Salmon Poetry) and the translations Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona, Salmon Poetry), Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, White Pine Press), Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux, Éditions du Cygne), Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings (WhitmanWeb), and The Abduction (Maram Al-Masri, forthcoming White Pine Press). Translated into 16 languages and recipient of over 20 honors & awards, including the Independent Press Award and Hemingway Grant, she holds an MA in American Literature (Sorbonne), worked as a translator for the Canadian Embassy, and taught at Hamilton College and Loyola Marymount University.

Boris Dralyuk is the Editor in Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), and translator of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. His poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. His collection My Hollywood and Other Poems is forthcoming from Paul Dry Books in April 2022.

Archana Venkatesan is Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. She studies text, visuality, and performance in early-medieval Tamil country. Her translations are inspired by extensive fieldwork in the temples of Tamilnadu, where Tamil devotional poetry continues to be read, recited, and relished. Archana is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Institute of Indian Studies and Fulbright. Her book, Endless Song: Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi, received the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation prize in 2021.

Publishers, don’t forget to submit your 2021 poetry in translation titles for our judges to consider by April 18!