L to R (top row): Bo-Elise Brummelkamp, Marissa Davis (Photo Credit: Jenna Lanzaro), Helga Edström, Jenny Jisun Kim;
L to R (bottom row): Enshia Li, Giulia Ratti, Peera Songkünnatham (Photo Credit: Jordan Goul), Yuki Tejima
Image Description: A mint-green background with the ALTA logo and the heading, “Meet the 2023 ALTA Mentees!” Below this, eight individual pictures of people with various backgrounds. For individual image descriptions, please visit the mentees’ “Learn More” pages.
February 6, 2023—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is pleased to announce the mentees for the eighth year of the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program! The program is designed to establish and facilitate a close working relationship between an experienced translator and an emerging translator on a literary translation project selected by the emerging translator. Congratulations to these eight exceptional emerging translators, listed here in alphabetical order by surname:
Bo-Elise Brummelkamp (Dutch Prose)
Bo-Elise Brummelkamp is a Dutch-English translator based in Scotland. She started working as a commercial translator in the summer of 2020 after finishing her English Language and Literature degree, but has recently started taking steps towards literary translation. This will be her first full-length literary project. Learn more about Bo-Elise here.
Marissa Davis (Non-Language-Specific, Non-Genre Specific)
Marissa Davis is a writer and translator from Kentucky. Her translations from French have been published in The Common, American Chordata, The Offing, and other journals. She has previously served as Translations Editor for Washington Square Review, and she holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. Learn more about Marissa here.
Helga Edström (Swedish)
Helga Edström is an emerging translator from Stockholm, Sweden. She studied Politics at Mount Holyoke College and has since then split her time between Massachusetts, New York City, and Stockholm. With her mentor Kira Josefsson, she will translate her first book-length project from Swedish to English. Learn more about Helga here.
Jenny Jisun Kim (Korean Poetry)
Jenny Jisun Kim is a translator and artist based in New Jersey. She translates from her native language, Korean, into English. With the support of ALTA’s mentorship, she will be working on her first book-length translation of Jaewon Che’s poetry. Learn more about Jenny here.
Enshia Li (Literature from Taiwan)
Enshia Li is an emerging translator and writer from Toronto. She graduated from Stanford University in 2022 with an undergraduate degree in East Asian Studies and English Literature. Currently, she is based in California. Learn more about Enshia here.
Giulia Ratti (Korean Prose)
Hailing from Italy, Giulia Ratti is an aspiring translator, not quite emerged as of yet. After an MA in Korean Literature at SOAS and a stint as an anxious office worker, she attended LTI Korea. When she’s not walking her just-as-anxious dog, Giulia works as a freelancer. Learn more about Giulia here.
Peera Songkünnatham (Non-Language-Specific BIPOC Mentorship in Prose)
Peera Songkünnatham is a writer and translator from Sisaket City, northeastern Thailand, who lives in Indianapolis. In 2018, they finished translating Juan Rulfo’s short story collection El Llano en llamas to Isan, a mix of Thai and Lao. Now they are translating Jarupat Petcharawet’s Isan story collection Corvus to English. Learn more about Peera here.
Yuki Tejima (Japanese)
Yuki Tejima is a Japanese-to-English translator based in Tokyo and Los Angeles, where she was raised. A graduate of University of California, Irvine, she has worked for twelve years in film, television and commercial translation. She is a winner of the 2020 JLPP International Translation Competition. Learn more about Yuki here.
The 2023 ALTA mentees will share their work at a reading at the ALTA46 conference in November 2023. Details forthcoming.
These mentorships are offered by ALTA in partnership with Amazon Crossing, generous individual donors, the Dutch Foundation for Literature, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, the Swedish Arts Council, Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles (TECO-LA), and the Yanai Initiative at UCLA.
Follow these links for details about the program and this year’s mentors.