This is the 14th year of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund grants, made possible by a generous donation from translator Michael Henry Heim and his wife, Priscilla Heim, and there was yet again a record number of applications this year: 224! From having served on the Fund’s Advisory Board for several years back when the number of applications received was still under 100, I salute this year’s particularly hard-working judges, Tynan Kogane, Fiona McCrae, Canaan Morse, Idra Novey, Allison Markin Powell, Antonio Romani, Chip Rossetti, Shabnam Nadiya, Ross Ufberg, and this year’s chair Edna McCown. This year, as was announced today, 15 projects were selected for grants, translated from 13 different languages including Arabic, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Nepali. Each of these translators will receive a $3,870 grant to aid them in completing their translations-in-progress.
Here are this year’s grant recipients:
Nick Admussen for his translation of Floral Mutter, a collection of poems by the contemporary Sichuanese poet Ya Shi (Forthcoming from Zephyr Press.)
Polly Barton for her translation of Cowards Who Looked to the Sky by Misumi Kubo.
Elizabeth Bryer for her translation from the Spanish of The Palimpsests by Aleksandra Lun, a novelist who lives in Spain but grew up in Poland.
Vitaly Chernetsky for his translation of Ukranian writer Sophia Andrukhovych’s novel Felix Austria.
Iain Galbraith for his compilation and translation from the German of Raoul Schrott: Selected Poems.
Michelle Gil-Montero for her translations of the work of Mexican poet, translator, and visual artist, Valerie Meyer Caso.
Sophie Hughes for her translation from the Spanish of The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán,
Elisabeth Jaquette for her translation from Arabic of the 2009 short story collection Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Sudanese author, journalist, and activist Rania Mamoun.
Kira Josefsson for her translation from the Swedish of the novel The Arab by Pooneh Rohi,
Adam Morris for his translation of I Didn’t Talk, a novel by Brazilian author Beatriz Bracher. (Forthcoming from New Directions.)
Kaitlin Rees for her translation from the Vietnamese of Nhã Thuyên’s poetry collection A Parade.
Dayla Rogers for her translation of Wûf, a work of fiction by Kemal Varol, a Turkish author of Kurdish ethnicity.
Christopher Tamigi for his translation from the Italian of In Your Name by Mauro Covacich.
Manjushree Thapa for her translation from the Nepali of There’s a Carnival Today by Indra Bahadur Rai. (Forthcoming from Speaking Tiger Publishing.)
Joyce Zonana for her translation from the French of the novel This Land That Is Like You by Tobie Nathan.
In addition to these 15 awards, there’s a new additional one administered within the PEN/Heim Translation Fund that’s being made this year for the first time, the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature, which awards a translator $5,000 to complete a translation of a work from the Italian. The inaugural award goes to:
Douglas Grant Heise for his translation of the metafictional novel Ithaca Forever, by Luigi Malerba.
The Advisory Board also nominates applicants for funding from the New York State Council for the Arts. This year’s nominees are:
Sean Gasper Bye, Hazem Jamjoum, Julia Sanches, and Jennifer Zoble.
Unless otherwise indicated, all the works listed above are available for publication – editors and publishers take note! For more information about the translators and their books, see the PEN American Center website.