The PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature awards a $5,000 grant to a translator for a work in progress of a book-length translation of an Italian work of literary fiction or nonfiction into English. The grant operates within the existing PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants which are offered annually to promote the publication of translated world literature in English.
This grant was awarded for the first time during the 2017 PEN Literary Awards cycle.
Submissions for the 2027 cycle are open through June 15.
2026 Recipient
Lauren Green’s translation from the Italian of Adoration by Alice Urciuolo
Judges: Elizabeth Lowe (Chair), Elvira Blanco, Ezra Fitz, Denise Kripper, Jenny McPhee, Mario Pereira, Shuchi Saraswat, Declan Spring
Adoration is a fierce and absorbing novel set in the reclaimed marshlands south of Rome, where five teenagers struggle to make sense of a friend’s murder and the suffocating models of masculinity and desire that surround them. With shifting points of view and a keen eye for the rituals and violences that shape adolescence, Alice Urciuolo explores how a place saturated with Fascist history and patriarchal norms produces its own forms of rebellion as well as complicity.
Lauren Aliza Green’s translation reflects the urgency and intimacy of Urciuolo’s prose, capturing the novel’s polyphonic voices and its precise rendering of place, class, and coming of age. A novelist and poet herself, Green is well equipped to convey both the emotional range and the structural ambition of this compelling novel. Green’s English version delivers the novel’s full force: a clear-eyed and unsettling portrait of contemporary Italian youth, and the cultural legacies they inherit and resist.
Past Recipients
2025
Judges: Elizabeth Lowe (Chair), Christopher Atamian, Elvira Blanco, Ezra Fitz, Denise Kripper, Yahia Lababidi, Jenny McPhee, Mario Pereira
Beth Hickling-Moore’s translation of Arcade by Alessandra Mureddu
Arcade (Azzardo) by Alessandra Mureddu is an unflinching work of autofiction exploring addiction, family trauma, and the societal obsession with instant gratification. The novel follows the narrator, also named Alessandra, as she attempts to “save” her father, a pathological gambler, only to find herself trapped emotionally and financially in the same perilous cycle. Soon she, too, is lost in the cold, mechanical world of slot machines. The protagonist’s relationship with her father, as well as her experiences with abusive men, paints a brutal portrait of how addiction interlaces with power dynamics and self-destruction, particularly within the context of a male-dominated gambling world. The novel brilliantly portrays a gamified society that commodifies even the most personal aspects of human life. Beth Hickling-Moore’s translation captures the raw urgency of Mureddu’s prose. Through careful attention to the nuances of addiction and the haunting repetition of routine, Hickling-Moore brings to life the narrator’s inner turmoil and the dehumanizing effects of the gambling world. The translation’s precision maintains the tension of the original text, while allowing the emotional weight to resonate in English with a palpable sense of dread and inevitability. The non-linear structure of the novel—alternating Alessandra’s path towards addiction with painful childhood memories—has been deftly mirrored in English, preserving the novel’s unsettling rhythm.
2024
Judges: Nicholas Glastonbury (Chair), Jenny Bhatt, Deborah Ghim, Kira Josefsson, Tom Kitson, Lina Mounzer, Kaitlin Rees, Alex Valente, Jordan Yamaji Smith, Jeffrey Zuckerman
Antonella Lettieri’s translation of Where You Did Not Take Me by Maria Grazia Calandrone
From the judges’ citation: Maria Grazia Calandrone, known for her poetic work in the Italian literary landscape, writes a lyric of investigation and intimate dissection of her life – and that of her biological parents, which ended tragically. Dove non mi hai portata (Where You Did Not Take Me) is a haunting, visceral examination of the failures of Italian society towards young mothers, young families, welfare and mental health, one which Antonella Lettieri brings into English with the same depths of understanding and compassion that the author shows to her own mother; a translation which is precise, careful, and steeped in the warmth of empathy.
2023
Judges: Nicholas Glastonbury (Chair), Jenny Bhatt, Deborah Ghim, Kira Josefsson, Tom Kitson, Lina Mounzer, Kaitlin Rees, Alex Valente, Jordan Yamaji Smith, Jeffrey Zuckerman
Isabella Corletto’s translation of Italian of Fathers byGiorgia Tribuiani
From the judges’ citation: “Italian literature is famous for its family sagas and familial conflicts, but what Giorgia Trabuiani wrote with Padri (Fathers) is a novel which upends those traditional themes and ideas. Looking exactly how he did on the day he died more than 40 years earlier, Diego Valli appears at his old apartment and is met with his son Oscar, who he left behind as a child and is now well into his 50s. The pathos that Isabella Corletto deftly infuses in her translation forms a lovely counterpoint to the seemingly absurd premise, resulting in a strikingly original text.”
2022
Judges: Tess Lewis (Chair), Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Nicholas Glastonbury, Thomas Kitson, Aditi Machado, Minna Zallman Proctor, Kaitlin Rees, Jordan A. Yamaji Smith
Tim Cummins’ translation of We Will Take Our Revenge by Paolo Nori
From the judges’ citation: “Tim Cummins’s muscular translation of Paolo Nori’s radical, unhinged, and terrifically readable novel, We Will Take Our Revenge, distinguishes itself in its total ownership of voice. Tracing the unusual story of civil justice and parenting, Cummins’s translation finds a perfect point on the bridge between the music of the Italian sentence and the urgency of English. It is both foreign and deeply resonant.”
2021
Judges: Tess Lewis (Chair), Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Peter Constantine, Karen Emmerich, Nicholas Glastonbury, Elisabeth Jaquette, Aditi Machado, Sawako Nakayasu, Wanda Phipps, Jeremy Tiang, Lara Vergnaud, and Jeffrey Zuckerman
Brian Robert Moore’s translation of A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano
From the judges’ citation: “Lalla Romano’s 1957 Tetto Romano, translated by Brian Robert Moore under the title A Silence Shared, explores the intimate relationship that forms between two couples—Guilia and Stephano, Ada and Paolo—during the tail end of World War II in the Italian countryside. Paolo, plagued by a mysterious illness, is an intellectual involved in the antifascist resistance, and he and Ada have moved with their young daughter to Guilia’s hometown of Cuneo, where she is also living, while Stephano visits from the city when he can. The couples develop a closeness haunted by silences and privacies, in a book that explores the tension between public and private selves in a moment of historical turmoil. Moore’s translation offers sentences steeped in understated quiet that invite readers in with the same kind of guarded intimacy that the book itself treats.”
2020
Judges: Alta Price, Elisabeth Jaquette, Jenny Wang Medina, Jeremy Tiang, Katie Dublinski, Lara Vergnaud, Natasha Wimmer, Peter Constantine, Samantha Schnee, Tess Lewis
Minna Zallman Proctor’s translation of The Renegade: Natalia Ginzburg, Her Life and Writing by Sandra Petrignani
2019
Judges: Jenny Wang Medina, Peter Constantine, John Balcom, Katie Dublinski, Ben Moser, Mary Ann Newman, Samantha Schnee, Max Weiss, Natasha Wimmer
Hope Campbell Gustafson’s translation of The Commander of the River by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah
2018
Judges: John Balcom, Peter Constantine, Tynan Kogane, Allison Markin Powell, Fiona McCrae, Mary Ann Newman, Antonio Romani, Chip Rossetti, Ross Ufberg, Natasha Wimmer, and Board Chair Samantha Schnee
Jeanna Bonner’s translation of A Walk in the Shadows by Mariateresa Di Lascia
2017
Judges: Tynan Kogane, Edna McCown, Fiona McCrae, Canaan Morse, Idra Novey, Allison Markin Powell, Antonio Romani, Chip Rossetti, Shabnam Nadiya, Ross Ufberg
Douglas Grant Heise’s translation of Ithaca Forever by Luigi Malerba
Eligibility and Submission Guidelines
A recipient is selected from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant applicant pool. Please see the eligibility and submission guidelines for the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants for information on how to apply. Any applicant who submits to the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants whose project is a translation of narrative prose from the Italian into English is automatically considered for the PEN Grant for the Translation of Italian Literature.
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