This year, as a contribution to Women in Translation Month, created by Meytal Radzinski in 2014, the PEN America Translation Committee presents a series of blog posts featuring books written by women that have won the PEN Translation Prize and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, as well as books by female authors that were published after having received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant.
These works of literature have been judged to represent the finest writing by women worldwide, brought into English—from Russian, French, Polish, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Spanish, Pashto, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, German, Lithuanian, Swedish, Korean, Italian, and Chinese—by the most skillful translators in the field. The fact that PEN America’s translation prizes have gone disproportionately to books by men over the years illustrates the problem that Radzinski identified in December 2013, when she first noticed, and documented, as she later put it, “this startling skew.”
Click here for an account of how Women in Translation Month came into being, and a look at some of the efforts aimed at getting more female authors translated into English and more people reading them. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow the conversation at #womenintranslation and #WITMonth. Also visit Women in Translation, a Tumblr I cofounded with Margaret Carson, where daily updates will be posted throughout August.
We hope you’ll be inspired by these lists of great books to pick some of them up and read them this month—and keep on reading women in translation in all the months to come!
54 total; 8 written by women
(Note: The PEN Translation Prize was formerly known as the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. It changed names in 2009.)
1971: Max Hayward, for Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam (Atheneum), translated from the Russian
Amazon | Indiebound
1986: Barbara Bray, for The Lover by Marguerite Duras (Pantheon), translated from the French
Amazon | Indiebound
1988: Madeline Levine and Francine Prose, for A Scrap of Time by Ida Fink (Pantheon), translated from the Polish
Amazon | Indiebound
1996: Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, for View With a Grain of Sand by Wisława Szymborska (Harcourt), translated from the Polish
Amazon | Indiebound
2001: Tiina Nunnally, for Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross by Sigrid Undset (Penguin), translated from the Norwegian
Amazon | Indiebound
2007: Sandra Smith, for Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (Knopf), translated from the French
Amazon | Indiebound
2015: Denise Newman, for Baboon by Naja Marie Aidt (Two Lines Press), translated from the Danish
Amazon | Indiebound
2016: Katrina Dodson, for The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector (New Directions), translated from the Portuguese
Amazon | Indiebound