The Italian Prose in Translation Award (IPTA), which was inaugurated in 2015, recognizes the importance of contemporary Italian prose (fiction and literary non-fiction) and promotes the translation of Italian works into English. This $5,000 prize is awarded annually to a translator of a recent work of Italian prose (fiction or literary non-fiction). The winning translators and books are featured at the annual ALTA conference. Both translators and publishers are invited to submit titles, and submissions are open this year until April 18 at 11:59pm PT.

We are delighted to spotlight this year’s IPTA judges, Nerina Cocchi, Douglas Grant Heise, and Barbara Ofosu-Somuah! Learn more about them below:

Nerina Cocchi is an Italian theatre artist, author and translator living in Brussels, Belgium. A proud ALTA member, her translations have been published by magazines such as Words Without Borders and The Arkansas International. As co-artistic director of inoutput, Nerina develops artistic projects at the crossroad between various disciplines, with translingualism, audience participation and women’s experiences as recurring themes. She was a 2019 recipient of Bourse Claude Etienne, a program for emerging Belgian playwrights, with her Arctic project Ad Nauseam, and recently published her first fiction book in French, Récits de femmes aventurières, in collaboration with Centre Culturel de Jette.

Douglas Grant Heise is a freelance translator of all kinds of texts from the humanities and social sciences, though literature is what he likes doing best.  He has lived in Italy, his adopted home, since 2001 and has been an Italian citizen for 7 years.  Since translating does not pay the bills, he works as a tour guide and study abroad coordinator in the Cinque Terre along the coast of the Italian Riviera.  For the past two years during the pandemic, he and his wife have been rebuilding — by hand — an abandoned vineyard in the steep hills above their own, and will be planting grape vines in March of 2022.

Barbara Ofosu-Somuah is a writer and Italian-to-English translator. Her translations bring the works of contemporary Black Italian writers to readers of English. She has received both Thomas J. Watson and Fulbright research fellowships to investigate the racialized lived experiences of Black people, primarily women, across the African diaspora. She leverages translation to make those stories accessible.

Translators and publishers, don’t forget to submit to the 2022 Italian Prose in Translation Award by April 18!