Jamie Richards, left, and Cole Swensen are the two winners of the United States’ National Translators Award from the American Literary Translators Association
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
See also:
‘From Italy to the World’: A Translators’ Conference at Frankfurt
‘A Starting Point for Readers’
Today (October 30), we want to recoup a couple of awards stories that weren’t something we could cover during the brunt of news at Frankfurter Buchmesse (in 2025, October 15 to 19).
One of these was a 2024 winners’ announcement from ALTA, as it’s known, the influential American Literary Translators Association. As is often noted, this is one of the competitions in the world of translation in which jurors frequently can read both an original text and its translation. Because of the rich depth of language pairings, the association’s National Translation Awards carry an extra nod of excellence to them because the works chosen have essentially been read on both sides of the translation process.
Announced on Saturday (October 26) at the association’s annual conference, ALTA: Voices in Translation—this year in the political “battleground state” of Wisconsin at Milwaukee—these awards pay US$4,000 to each of the two winners in this competition founded in 1998.
The two categories here are poetry and prose, and you can review our shortlist story here.
2024Winner: National Translation Award in Prose
- By Marosia Castaldi
- Translated from Italian by Jamie Richards
- Published by And Other Stories
Translator Jamie Richards’ work is focused on contemporary and 20th-century Italian fiction and comics. She’s the recipient of a US National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship, and is based in Los Angeles.
Jurors for this year’s prose entries are Philip Boehm, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Will Forrester, Joon-Li Kim, and Poupeh Missaghi.
2024Winner: National Translation Award in Poetry
- By Pierre Alferi
- Translated from French by Cole Swensen
- Published by Green Linden Press
Cole Swensen is a poet and translator. Of her 20 collections of poetry, the most recent, And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), was longlisted for the Griffin Prize and a finalist for the Big Other Award. She has won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series and has been a finalist for the US National Book Award and twice for the LA Times Book Award.
The jurors in the poetry category for 2024 are Kazim Ali, Ronnie Apter, and Mary Jo Bang.
Chenxin Jiang
In congratulating the two winners, ALTA president Chenxin Jiang says, “We are proud to administer the National Translation Awards, which turn the spotlight on a number of accomplished translators, writers, and the publishers who make it possible for these marvelous books to appear in English.
“We also hope they offer a starting point for readers hoping to pick up a new book or three in translation.”
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.”
Going back to our note earlier in this article, this awards program’s media messaging notes that it “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.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on translation is here, more from us on the American Literary Translators Association is here, and on publishing and book awards is here.