Winner

Katrina Dodson for her translation of Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories (New Directions) Read an excerpt »

The $3,000 PEN Translation Prize invites submissions of book-length translations from any language into English published during the current calendar year.

From the Judges’ Citation

Katrina Dodson’s translation of Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories is a revelation that lays bare the breadth of both the author’s and translator’s talent. Our unanimous selection of Complete Stories underscores the absolute pleasure of being steeped in Lispector’s deep intellect and her striking, varied portraits of human interaction and intimacy, rendered rich and vivid by Dodson’s steady hand. The Complete Stories are diverse in tone, mood, perspective, subject matter, and quirk, and Dodson’s dexterity in navigating these differences, while simultaneously lending Lispector a singular English voice all her own, is a thoroughly impressive feat of literary translation. Benjamin Moser’s insightful introduction and Dodson’s translator’s afterword situate the book within the contemporary resurgence of Lispector translations and accentuate the radical imagination of Dodson’s work. This is an extraordinary translation of an exceptional author.”

Shortlist

The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
Translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson
New Directions
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin
Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Translated from the Russian by Oliver Ready
Penguin Classics
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov
Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
Open Letter Books
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

Hollow Heart by Viola Di Grado
Translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar
Europa Editions
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

Longlist

The Sound of Our Steps by Ronit Matalon
Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
Translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson
New Directions
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin
Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah
Translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell
AmazonCrossing 
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

The Game for Real by Richard Weiner
Translated from the Czech by Benjamin Paloff
Two Lines Press
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

Sphinx by Anne Garréta
Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
Deep Vellum Publishing
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Translated from the Russian by Oliver Ready
Penguin Classics
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov
Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
Open Letter Books
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

Hollow Heart by Viola Di Grado
Translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar
Europa Editions
Amazon | Indie Bound
 

Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano
Translated from the French by Phoebe Weston-Evans
Yale University Press/Margellos World Republic of Letters
Amazon | Indie Bound

 

2016 Judges

 

Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from the Arabic. She holds an MA from Columbia University and a BA from Swarthmore College. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Words Without Borders, and Asymptote Journal, among other places. She is also the Arabic reading group chair for UK publisher And Other Stories. Her first book-length translation is The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz (forthcoming with Melville House in 2016), for which she received a 2014 English PEN Translates award.
 

Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel & Grau, 2015). Her essays on translation and international literature have appeared in Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Partisan Review, Poets & Writers, and The Wilson Quarterly. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and is also a contributing editor at A Public Space and a mentor at The National Yiddish Book Center.
 

Ronald Meyer teaches the seminar on Russian literary translation at Columbia University. He received a translation grant from the Wheatland Foundation for his edition of Anna Akhmatova’s selected prose, My Half-Century (Ardis, 1992; reprinted by Northwestern and Overlook). Other translations include Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler and Other Stories (Penguin, 2010) and contemporary fiction by Karabchievsky, Levental, and Palei. Meyer is currently translating book two of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s historical novel, April 1917. He is a member of the PEN Translation Committee.

Sara Novic is the author of the novel Girl at War (Random House and Little, Brown UK). Her work has appeared in The Guardian, the LA Review of Books, VICE, Guernica, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and Circumference, among other publications. She is the recipient of the 2014 ALTA Fellowship and the 2014 Barnstone Literary Translation Prize. She is the fiction editor at Blunderbuss Magazine, and holds an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University.
 

Jeffrey Zuckerman is digital editor of Music & Literature Magazine. His translations from the French include Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins (Deep Vellum, 2016) and Antoine Volodine’s Radiant Terminus (Open Letter, 2017) as well as numerous texts by Marie Darrieussecq, Hervé Guibert, Régis Jauffret, and Kaija Saariaho, among others. A graduate of Yale University, his writing and translations have appeared in Best European Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, and Vice.

 

Past Winners

Archibald Colquhoun, Ralph Manheim, Joseph Barnes, Geoffrey Skelton and Adrian Mitchell, Harriet de Onis, Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks, W.S. Merwin, Sidney Alexander, Max Hayward, Clara and Richard Winston, J.P. McCullough, Hardie St. Martin and Leonard Mades, Helen R. Lane, Richard Howard, Gregory Rabassa, Adrienne Foulke, Charles Wright, Charles Simic, John E. Woods, Hiroaki sato and Burton Watson, Richard Wilbur, William Weaver, Helen R. Lane, Seamus Heaney, Barbara Bray, Dennis Tedlock, John E. Woods, Madeline Levine and Francine Prose, Matthew Ward, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, David Rosenberg, Thomas Hoisington, Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow, Burton Watson, Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, Arnold Pomerans, Peter Constantine, Michael Hofmann, Richard Sieberth, Tiina Nunnally, R.W. Flint, Margaret Sayers Peden, Tim Wilkinson, Philip Gabriel, Sandra Smith, Margaret Jull Costa, Natasha Wimmer, Michael Henry Heim, Ibrahim Muhawi, Bill Johnston, Donald O. White, Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov, and Denise Newman.

Click here for additional information, including submission guidelines, for the award.