November 6, 2025—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced the winners of the 2025 National Translation Awards (NTA) in Poetry and Prose today at an Awards Ceremony as part of ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA48: Visions and Versions, in Tucson, AZ. Judges George Henson, Ilze Duarte, and Peter Constantine conferred the prize on Barbara Romaine, who read a short statement and selection from the winning text. 2025 marks the 27th year for the NTA, and the 11th year to award separate prizes in poetry and prose.

This year’s prose judges are Peter Constantine, Ilze Duarte, George Henson, Hoyoung Moon, and Manjushree Thapa. The winner will receive a $4,000 cash prize.

Winner: 2025 National Translation Award in Prose

Sand-Catcher
By Omar Khalifah
Translated from Arabic by Barbara Romaine
Coffee House Press

This is what the judges had to say about this year’s winner:

Every now and then a novel cuts through the noise and calls out the truth of the present moment. Omar Khalifah’s Sand-Catcher is that novel, and it is Barbara Romaine’s translation that gives it its compelling voice in English. Barbara Romaine captures the brisk humor, tonal richness, and emotional precision of Khalífah’s prose, bringing to life the layered realities of the Palestinian diaspora. There is an elegance and an immediacy in her rendering that draws us into the heart of the story. The novel follows the travails of four Amman-based journalists tasked with persuading an elderly survivor of the Nakba to share his story. When he refuses, a fracas ensues; and the unraveling of their mission–and indeed of the very possibility of truth-telling–serves as an unerringly timely reminder of all the stories that are not being told today. Barbara Romaine’s translation is a triumph of both language and empathy.

About the winner

Barbara Romaine, originally a classicist, took up the study of Arabic following a 1987 professional assignment in Egypt. In 1990, she commenced a thirty-year career teaching Arabic. She published her first book-length translation—Bahaa Taher’s Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery—in 1996. Altogether, she has published her translations of seven novels, representing Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine, as well as numerous shorter selections which have appeared in literary journals. She held NEA translation fellowships in 2007 and 2015, and in 2011 her translation of Radwa Ashour’s Specters placed second in the Saif Ghobash-Banipal competition for Arabic literary translation.

Image description: Barbara, ethnically your basic WASP, stands against a gray backdrop, to be photographed for a Global Studies Department profile, back when she was still on the faculty at Villanova University. She has no other suitable head-shots, but she likes to think she hasn’t changed dramatically since this one was taken.

About the National Translation Awards

The National Translation Award 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, which is administered by American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), is the only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work.

The 2026 National Translation Award submissions portal will be opened in January 2026.