Write the World 2025: From Writers to Readers: The Impact of Translation Awards, sponsored by SZBA

In this panel discussion, we will examine the impact of the awards on all areas of the publishing ecosphere—from writers to publishers to booksellers—to see how these awards work in practice, hosted by the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.

Moderator: Erin Cox

Panelists: Spencer Rucchi, Michael Cooperson, Maya Solovej

Erin L. Cox has spent more than 25 years on the business development and promotional side of the publishing industry, working in book publicity at Scribner and HarperCollins, advertising sales and marketing at The New Yorker, and working with international organizations such as Frankfurter Buchmesse and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award. Recently, she took the role of Publisher at Publishing Perspectives, to help bring great stories to new markets.

Spencer Ruchti is the author events manager for Third Place Books in Seattle, Washington. With Justin Walls, he co-founded the Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation in 2023, the only literary award that recognizes works of literature translated into English as selected by a committee of independent booksellers. Ruchti started as a bookseller in 2017, where he helped curate Harvard Book Store’s award-winning author series. He’s also worked in editorial roles at Boston Review and Tin House Books. Before Third Place Books, he was a bookseller at Broadway Books in Portland, Oregon. He lives in Seattle.

Michael Cooperson is an American author, translator, and currently a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. His research addresses the literary and cultural history of Southwest Asia in the pre-modern period, primarily through Arabic sources. His first two monographs focus on the age of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun (r. 813-33), who sponsored the translation of scientific works from Greek, Syriac, and other languages. Cooperson is the translator of Ibn al-Jawzi’s hagiographic Life of Ibn Hanbal (winner of the Sheikh Hamad Award, 2016) and of al-Hariri’s comical Impostures (winner of the Sheikh Zayed Award, 2021).

Maya Solovej is Assistant Editor and Publicity Manager at New Directions. Most recently she has been editing Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume and the rediscovered French writer Hélène Bessette’s Lily Is Crying, which will be forthcoming this June. She grew up in Copenhagen, and lives in Brooklyn.

Resources and Links Mentioned:

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award
Cercador Prize
Nordic Council Literature Prize
NBCC Gregg Barrios Translation Prize
Prize list
ALTA’s 2025 Award Judges
WWB Award for Emerging Translators
Three Percent Podcast
ALTA First Translation Prize
Hugo Awards