February 6, 2024—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is pleased to announce the mentees for the ninth 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 seventeen exceptional emerging translators, listed here in alphabetical order by surname:

Munawwar Abdulla (Non-language-specific, non-genre-specific BIPOC mentorship)
Munawwar Abdulla is an emerging Uyghur-to-English translator based in Massachusetts. When not translating, she splits her time between researching brains, Uyghur activism, and community-building work. Her writings have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, The Margins, and others, and she recently co-edited the anthology Under the Mulberry Tree. Learn more about Munawwar here.

Ammara Ahmad (Panjabi)
Ammara Ahmad is a writer and journalist from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has appeared in Dawn, The Wire, Scroll, Quint, Indian Express, and Malaysiakini. She is a language activist and has been actively promoting Punjabi, which is a dying language in Pakistan. She can be reached as @ammarawrites on Twitter. Learn more about Ammara here.

Miriam Akervall (Swedish)
Miriam is a Swedish-American translator and MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Idaho. Their work appears in The Fourth River Literary Journal, Volume Poetry, Voicemail Poems and elsewhere. They were longlisted for the 2023 Frontier Poetry “New Voices” Poetry Prize. They live in Moscow, Idaho. Learn more about Miriam here.

Subhashree Beeman (Tamil)
Subhashree Beeman is a US-based literary and commercial translator working in the languages Tamil, French, Spanish, and English. She was born and raised in Chennai, India. Through the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship, she will be translating her first book-length work from Tamil under the guidance of Mr. Kalyan Raman. Learn more about Subhashree here.

Marialena Carr (Catalan)
Marialena Carr was born 97 kilometers south of Barcelona and now lives due north of NYC. After half a lifetime as a research oceanographer she turned to writing and translation. Her translations from the Catalan can be found in Hyperion and Metamorphoses, and El Jo-Ull/The I-Eye by Vicenç Altaió. Learn more about Marialena here.

Sritama Halder (Bangla)
Sritama Halder is the Reading Facilitator at a Kolkata-based high school by day and a translator by night. As the Reading Facilitator, her job is to initiate her students into book-reading. As a translator, she translates academic articles from English to Bangla for CASI, University of Pennsylvania. Learn more about Sritama here.

Tony Hao (Literature from Taiwan)
Tony Hao is a translator and writer based in Connecticut. He is a recent graduate of Yale University, where he majored in English and studied fiction writing, journalism, and literary translation. Under the guidance of his mentor Steve Bradbury, he will translate contemporary prose written in Taiwanese Mandarin. Learn more about Tony here.

Dabin Jeong (Korean Poetry)
Dabin Jeong (they/them | they/she) is a poet and translator from Seoul, South Korea. Their works have appeared or are forthcoming in DIALOGIST, Salt Hill Journal, The Maine Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Indiana Review, and Chogwa. They are an MFA in Poetry candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Learn more about Dabin here.

Hannah Kim (Korean Prose)
Hannah Kim is a writer and translator based in Seoul, South Korea. She has a MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University and is currently receiving her MA in Korean-English interpretation from Ewha Womans University. She leads literary seminars on Korean translated fiction at Literary Arts. Learn more about Hannah here.

Sophie Grace Lellman (Literature from Québec)
Sophie Grace Lellman is bookseller, publicist, and editor based in New York City, where she works for two translation-focused indie presses. She received her MA in Comparative Literature from King’s College London in 2022. She will be translating her first book-length project with the support of the ALTA mentorship. Learn more about Sophie here.

Monika Lutostanski (Polish)
Monika Lutostanski is a Polish-American translator, linguist, and astrologer. Born and raised in Vermont, USA, she currently resides in London, UK, but calls Kraków, Poland, home. Having studied Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia, she translates from both Polish and Russian into English. Learn more about Monika here.

Rachel Moles (Nepali)
Rachel Moles is a novice translator from England who also writes and acts. She was based in Kathmandu, Nepal between 2012 and Covid, where she taught English, worked for development organizations, and made some forays into film and theatre. She will be translating a Nepali novel into English. Learn more about Rachel here.

Megumi Noda (Japanese)
Megumi Noda is an aspiring literary translator of Japanese to English and English to Japanese, based in Tokyo, Japan. Most of her translation experience so far has been in a corporate context, and this will be her first full-length literary project from Japanese to English. Learn more about Megumi here.

Aditya Vikram Shrivastava (Hindi)
Aditya Vikram is a writer, translator, and emerging scholar from Lucknow, India. Currently a teaching fellow in the English department at Ashoka University, they are interested in questions of language, regionality, postcolonialism, performance, and gender. Their critical and creative literary work has been published by Goethe Institute, British Council, Agents of Ishq, and Gulmohur Quarterly, among others. Learn more about Aditya here.

Ananthu Sunil (Malayalam)
Ananthu Sunil is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in English, also working as a freelance translator on the side. Ananthu is also a rapper and songwriter, working hard to garner attention for his songs blending English and Malayalam lyrics. Learn more about Ananthu here.

Poorna Swami (Urdu)
Poorna Swami is a writer, poet, and choreographer from Bangalore, India. She received the 2018 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, and also the 2023 Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu translation. Currently, she is a PhD student in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Learn more about Poorna here.

Thila Varghese (Poetry from a South Asian language)
Thila Varghese lives in Canada, where she works part-time during the academic year as a Senior Writing Advisor at Western University. Her translations of Tamil literary works have been published in international journals and magazines. Thila’s translation entry was shortlisted in the 2023 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation. Learn more about Thila here.

The 2024 ALTA mentees will share their work at a reading at the ALTA47 conference in October 2024. Details forthcoming. 

The 2024 mentorships are offered by ALTA in partnership with the BIPOC Literary Translators Caucus, the Institut Ramon Llull, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, the Polish Cultural Institute New York, the SALT Project, the Swedish Arts Council, the Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, Québec Édition, and the Yanai Initiative.

Follow these links for details about the program and this year’s mentors.