These winners were selected from a pool of 130 applicants, which is pretty amazing when you stop to think about it.

Anyway, here’s the full list of winners:

Bernard Adams for his translation of Andrea Tompa’s A Hóhér Háza (The Hangman’s House), a poignant and beautiful novel about a girl growing up in a Romanian-Hungarian family during the 70s and 80s in Ceauşescu’s Romania. The translation combines a fine-fingered attention to detail with a powerful emotional sweep. (Available for publication)

Alexander Booth for Im Felderlatein (In Latin Fields) by Lutz Seiler. Widely acknowledged as one of the major German poets of his generation, the work of Seiler has been translated only sporadically. Booth’s translations give a strong sense of Seiler’s poetic voice, with an incessant use of fragmentation as he attempts to pin down memory (usually childhood memory, sometimes of traumatic events) and the stark imagery of his terse lines. (Available for publication)

Brent Edwards for L’Afrique Fantome (Phantom Africa) by Michel Leiris. A diaristic account of Leiris’s activities as the “secretary-archivist” of Marcel Griaule’s Mission Dakar-Djibouti (1931-33), often compared to Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques as introducing a path-breaking critical self-reflexivity into the discourse of anthropology. (Seagull Books)

Joshua Daniel Edwin for the first book of a young German poet Kummerang (Gloomerang) by Dagmara Kraus. These translations display an explosive inventiveness and poetic intelligence that finds surprising, engaging ways to render poems. They appeal as much through their sly punning and syncopated rhythms as they do through the stories told between the lines. (Available for publication)

Musharraf Ali Farooqi for his translation from the Urdu of Muhammad Husain Jah and Ahmed Husain Qamar’s Hoshruba: The Prisoner of Batin, the second volume of an 8000-page late-nineteenth century epic of magical fantasy based on the popular oral narrative tradition. (Random House India.)

Deborah Garfinkle for her translation of Worm-Eaten Time: Poems from a Life Under Normalization by the Czech poet Pavel Šrut. A selection of hallucinatory poems, banned by the government and circulating in samisdat, written during the Prague Spring of 1968 and then, after a ten-year silence, in the 1980s before the fall of Communism. (Available for publication)

Hillary Gulley for the translation of Marcelo Cohen’s El Fin de Los Mismo (The End of the Same), a formal experimentation and sci-fi-inflected mini-plots – a prison on the beach, a man in love with a woman with three arms – shape this finely wrought Argentinean novel. (Available for publication)

Bonnie Huie for her translation of Notes of a Crocodile by the Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin. The only novel published by Qiu before her suicide at 26, this work is an extraordinary combination of mash note, love story, comic shtick, aesthetic manifesto, and spiritual autobiography. It is a path-breaking queer novel and a classic of modern Taiwanese literature. (Available for publication)

�����ٳ󲹲Բ�ë�� for the Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert, a posthumous collection of the private journals that the well-known novelist and AIDS activist kept from 1976-1991—a series of literary snapshots of the author’s various objects of desire and mourning and already a classic of French autobiography. (Nightboat Books)

Jacquelyn Pope for her translation of Hester Knibbe’s Hungerpots, from the Dutch. These wry, unsentimental poems gently upend myths of domestic life and wax anti-poetically (yet beautifully) on the most ordinary manifestations of nature. (Available for publication)

Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad for a delightfully light-on-its-feet translation of the novel Mirages of the Mind by Urdu writer Mushtaq Ahmad Yousufi. Tracing an arc of nostalgia between Pakistan and India, its main characters are all Indian Muslim immigrants to Pakistan whose struggles veer from the comic to the tragic. The translators’ touch is graceful, lively, and supple. (Available for publication)

Carrie Reed for a complete translation of Yǒuyáng Zázǔ (Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang) by Duan Chengshi. A vast compendium from the Tang Dynasty of weird scientific and ethnographic information and generally strange stories. (Available for publication)

If you’re interested in getting information about any of these, you can contact Paul Morris (paul[at]pen.org) and Michael Moore (michael.moore[at]esteri.it) and they can pass along samples and contact info.

UPDATE: The has been found and added to this article.

Anyway, here’s info on all 11 recipients, along with info on their respective projects. If you’re a publisher and want more info on any of these, you should contact either Alena Graedon (alena[at]pen.org) or Michael Moore (michaelfmoore[at]gmail.com).

Oh, and kudos to Northwestern for already having signed on one of the most interesting sounding books from this list. Clearly they’re still going to be doing great translations even after the demise of the Writings from an Unbound Europe series.

• Amiri Ayanna for The St. Katharinental Sister Book: Lives of the Sisters of the Dominican Convent at Diessenhofen. A rare glimpse inside a holy community, The St. Katharinental Sister Book offers an intimate blend of biography, mystical poetry, and visionary literature. This masterful translation from Northeastern Swiss dialects of Middle High German is a rich compilation of pious testimonials that illuminate the lives of a medieval sisterhood. (Available for publication.)

• Neil Blackadder for The Test (Good Simon Korach), a play by renowned Swiss dramatist and novelist Lukas Bärfus. The shocking results of a paternity test and its moral implications force an agonizing examination into what defines a family. Supple and incisive, The Test is one of Bärfus’s most successful plays, and has been staged at major theaters across Germany. (Available for publication.)

• Clarissa Bosford for Sworn Virgin, a novel written in Italian by Albanian writer and filmmaker Elvira Dones. At once sweeping and immediate, Sworn Virgin engages with timely issues of identity, nationality, and sexuality. By rejecting an arranged marriage, Hana, the protagonist, is condemned to life in a double-bind: in the isolation of northern Albania and disguised as a man. Her decision to abandon her homeland for the United States coincides with a return to living as a woman that proves anything but simple. (Available for publication.)

• Steve Bradbury for Salsa, a collection of poems by the internationally-recognized Taiwanese poet Hsia Yü. Composed during the eight years Hsia lived in France, and regarded by many as her most important work to date, Salsa showcases Hsia’s fascination with sound, movement, and “the erotics of reading.” Bradbury’s translation captures Hsia’s distinct musicality, preserving the liveliness and ingenuity of her verse. (Available for publication.)

• Annmarie S. Drury for a collection of poems by Tanzanian poet Euphrase Kezilahabi, an acclaimed Swahili writer whose work is only now becoming more widely available to other readers. Saturated with vivid imagery, Kezilahabi’s poems reinvigorate traditional forms by introducing everyday language and free verse. An active promoter of accessibility, Kezilahabi’s work also offers a subtle social critique of the way language is used by those in power. (Available for publication.)

• Diane Nemec Ignashev for Paranoia, a novel by groundbreaking Belarusian author Viktor Martinovich, about a tragic love affair between an idealistic young writer and the captivating mistress of the chief state security officer. Banned in Martinovich’s home country, Paranoia is a wry, dystopian examination of the ruptures between fiction and reality. (To be published by Northwestern University Press.)

• Chenxin Jiang for Memories of the Cowshed, a memoir by celebrated Chinese author Ji Xianlin. A rare personal history from China’s devastating Cultural Revolution, Ji’s memoir recounts the painful and deeply disenchanting period he spent in “the cowshed,” an improvised prison for intellectuals and other alleged enemies of the Chinese state. A bestseller in China, Memories of the Cowshed offers an essential window onto this tumultuous moment in history. (Available for publication.)

• Hilary B. Kaplan for Rilke Shake by the inventive Brazilian writer Angélica Freitas. Rilke Shake is a milkshake of incisive poetic wordplay and irreverent culture-crossing slang, expertly conveyed by Kaplan’s sharp translation. In this collection, Freitas explores poetic and personal identity formation, influencing a new generation of writers and artists who blend cultures and nationalities. (Available for publication.)

• Catherine Schelbert for Flametti, or the Dandyism of the Poor a novel by visionary German writer Hugo Ball. This romp through early 20th-century Swiss low society offers an acerbic picture of class tensions and debasing social conditions. Ball, one of the leading Dadaists, said of Flametti, “It contains my whole philosophy.” Schelbert’s compelling translation — the first into English — is long overdue, and offers readers an essential work in the Ball oeuvre. (Available for publication.)

• Joel Streicker for Birds in the Mouth, a collection of short stories by up-and-coming Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin, who was named one of Granta_’s 2010 Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists. With _Birds in the Mouth, Schweblin stakes a claim on the dark frontier between realism and the fantastic, reanimating everyday experiences often taken for granted. Streicker’s outstanding translation makes this stunning collection — already translated into many other languages — available to English readers for the first time. (Available for publication.)

• Sarah L. Thomas for Turnaround, a literary thriller by pioneering Spanish writer Mar Goméz Glez. Published to great acclaim in Spain, Turnaround is set during the environmental crisis following a 2002 oil spill off the Cantabrian coast of Spain. Glez’s suspenseful story tracks the erratic fortunes of Pablo, who is trying to untangle his memories of a traumatic event while searching for his missing girlfriend. Thomas’s translation brings to life a story of how individual and collective destiny can converge and diverge in unexpected ways. (Available for publication.)

Congrats to all the winners!

Daniel Brunet for The Last Fire, a play by Dea Loher that examines the devastation wrought on a small community by the accidental death of a child. Following its premiere in Hamburg in 2008, it won both the 2008 Play of the Year award from Theater Heute and the 2008 Mülheim Drama Prize. (No publisher)

Alexander Dawe for a collection of short stories by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpmar (1901-1962), “the most surprising writer of 20th-century Turkish literature.” Opulent and lyrical in tone, Tanpmar’s stories orchestrate Western and Eastern influences to speak of ordinary people torn by their allegiances to the past. (No publisher)

Peter Golub for a collection of flash fictions by Linor Goralik, an underground Russian author beginning to make a name for herself in the literary mainstream. These very short stories catch their characters in midflight, like strangers on an airplane, combining the mythic with the banal to startling effect, as when the wolf, disobeying doctor’s orders, steps out for one last visit to the three little pigs. (No publisher)

Piotr Gwiazda for Kopenhaga by Grzegorz Wroblewski, a Polish poet who has lived in Copenhagen since 1985, “far from Poland and far from Denmark.” Intimate, sarcastic, lucid, and uncompromising, Kopenhaga addresses the immigrant experience in post-Cold War Europe with documentary evidence and intellectual rigor. (No publisher)

David Hull for Waverings, a novel by Mao Dun (1896-1981), who joined the nascent Chinese Communist Party in 1921. A depiction of the failed revolution of 1927 set among workers, peasants, and Communist Party officials in an unnamed county seat in Hubei Province, Waverings won its author great acclaim, but its pessimism drew criticism from doctrinaire Communists. Hull’s translation is based on both the 1928 edition, published immediately after the events the novel describes, and the 1958 edition, significantly altered by the author. (No publisher)

Akinloye A. Ojo for Afaimo and other Poems (1972) the only poetry collection by Akinwumi Isola, a novelist, playwright, and one of the foremost figures in Yorùbá literature. Moving between exhortatory matter-of-factness and ecstatic incantation, these poems are a love song to the language they were written in. “Is it really my fault? / The bug that ate the vegetable isn’t guilty. / There is a limit to a plant’s beauty. Whoever pursues Àsúnlé is guiltless.” (No U.S. publisher)

Angela Rodel for Holy Light, stories by Georgi Tenev, a Bulgarian playwright, novelist, film/TV screenwriter, and talk show host. Alloying political sci-fi with striking eroticism, the stories in Holy Light depict a world of endless, wearying revolution and apocalypse, where bodies have succumbed to a sinister bio-politics of relentless cruelty and perversion. “In first class they offered easy emancipation, perhaps even electrocution, but he was traveling economy class where they wouldn’t even serve him food.” (No publisher)

Margo Rosen for Poetry and Untruth, a novel by Anatoly Naiman. Juxtaposing the fates of four Russian poets of the early 20th century (Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva) with those of the generation that came of age during Khrushchev’s thaw, this is part novel, part historical document. It draws from the writings of Russia’s greatest poets and the author’s own experience (he was Akhmatova’s literary secretary from 1962-1966) to convey a century of creative life that transcends the direness of Soviet history. (No publisher)

Chip Rossetti for Animals in Our Days, short stories by Mohamad Makhzangi, an Egyptian psychiatrist, journalist and fiction writer who was studying alternative medicine in Kiev during the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Drawing on Arabic traditions of animal fables, these stories, written with “translucent poetic sensibility,” use animals to comment on political oppression and the human capacity for encountering the magical and the inexplicable. (To be published by the American University in Cairo Press.)

Bilal Tanweer for Love in Chikiwara (And Other Such Adventures), a 1964 novel by Muhammad Khalid Akhtar (1920-2002)that has long been considered a masterpiece of Urdu humor. Our narrator, a genial, gullible bakery owner, makes the serious mistake of befriending Qurban Ali Kattar, the “Thomas Hardy of Urdu Literature,” who shamelessly exploits his hero-worship of all writers. A supporting cast of religious scam artists, bookbinders, restaurant owners, butchers, and minor deities make this novel something new and strange and warmly welcoming. (No publisher)

Diane Thiel for The Great Green, a 1987 novel by Eugenia Fakinou. Hugely popular in Greece (where it is now in its 43rd reprint), The Great Green portrays a woman escaping the constrictions of family and societal expectations. It interweaves the whole span of Greek history, from the Minoans and Homer’s Achaeans to the late Byzantine and early 19th-century periods, into the story of a single day in our own time, when an unknown woman mysteriously appears in a Greek village.

For those unfamiliar with the prize, this was established in 2003 thanks to an anonymous gift of some $730,000 and every year ten or so translators receive $2,000-$5,000 for a project they are working on. These projects don’t need to have a publisher already, and since translators apply directly, the Fund receives approx. 130 applications each year. (Almost half as many applications as the number of translations published in the U.S. . . .)

Anyway, here are this year’s winners:

Eric Abrahamsen for My Spiritual Homeland by Wang Xiaobo (1952-1997), a collection of penetrating, funny and breathtakingly frank essays written fifteen years after the Cultural Revolution by one of China’s most insightful and controversial writers. (No publisher)

Mee Chang for Garden of Youth (1981) by Oh Junghee, a series of powerful stories that center on the struggles of domestic life during the Korean War, by a writer widely recognized as the master of the Korean short story. (No publisher)

Robyn Creswell for The Clash of Images (1995) by Abdelfattah Kilito, a hybrid bildungsroman, written in French, set in the medina of an unnamed Moroccan city. Growing up in a traditional world where the image is taboo, the protagonist is seduced by new American technologies of the image. (No publisher)

Brett Foster for Elemental Rebel: The Rime of Cecco Angiolieri (1260-1310?), a selection of impudent sonnets by a Sienese rival of Dante with a penchant for parodic wordplay. (Forthcoming from Princeton University Press)

Geoffrey Michael Goshgarian for The Remnants by Hagop Oshagan (1883-1948), a historical novel widely considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Armenian literature, written in the early 1930s “to save what remained of our people.” (No publisher)

Tess Lewis for That Didn’t Reassure the Children (2006) by Alois Hotschnig, a collection of disquieting stories about the mystery, fluidity and perils of intimacy, by a prize-winning Austrian writer renowned for his stylistic virtuosity. (No publisher)

Fayre Makeig for Mourning (2006), a selection of free verse poems by H.E. Sayeh, an eminent contemporary Iranian poet whose life and work span many of Iran’s political, cultural and literary upheavals. “Tell us, heaven, why the rain / pours from your eyes…” (No publisher)

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra for Poems of Kabir, a selection of 60 Hindi padas (songs) by India’s legendary mystic poet saint (1398?-1448?) who opposed all religious and social orthodoxies and oppositions. “But I’m wasting my time, / Says Kabir, / Even death’s bludgeon / Ģ����ý to crush your head / Won’t wake you up.” (No publisher)

Frederika Randall for Deliver Us from Evil by Luigi Meneghello (1922-2007), a darkly original memoir, ordered by theme rather than chronology, set in rural Italy when the Church and Il Duce ruled. The savage immediacy of childhood perception combines with amused and astutely ironic insights in an unsentimental human comedy. (No publisher)

Daniel Shapiro for Missing Persons, Animals and Artists (1999) by Roberto Ransom, a short story collection by an acclaimed young Mexican writer which explores the enigmas of art and the creative process with gentle irony and whimsical, at times fantastical, premises. (No publisher)

Chantal Wright for A Handful of Water (2008), poems written in German by Tzveta Sofronieva, a young Bulgarian-born poet, trained as a physicist and science historian, who also writes in Bulgarian and English. Joseph Brodsky said of her, “Listen carefully… She has something to say.” (No publisher)

Congratulations to all the winners, and I’m especially pleased to see Tess Lewis, Eric Abrahamsen of ) and Daniel Shapiro of the Americas Society. The unsigned books on this list usually find a publisher within days, so it’s possible this is already out of date . . . Which is great for the translators and authors, and means that I really have to get moving on contacting the right people about the projects that sound most interesting to me . . .

• NEA Translation Fellowship applications are due on January 9th. All instructions and application info can be found The grants are for $12,500 or $25,000, so I encourage all eligible to apply, but you should get started asap—the online process for applying can be time consuming, especially the part about signing up at

• applications are due on January 16th. The application process is pretty straightforward, and you can either download the form from the PEN website, or by clicking here.

Most years about half of the recipients already have publishers lined up, and the other half generally find them after receiving the award.

is pretty interesting—none of eight projects receiving funding have a publisher lined up. (I’m sure that won’t last long.)

As always, it’s a great list of books and translators:

• Bernard Adams’ translation from the Hungarian of Dezsó Kosztolányi’s 1933 interlinking sequence of stories Kornél Esti, which takes its title from the name of the central character, who is the embodiment of senseless revolt, irresponsibility and latent cruelty. A leading Hungarian critic summed up the work in a phrase: “Lack of restraint restrained…” (No publisher)

• Jeffrey Angles’ translation from the Japanese of Twelve Perspectives, the 1970 memoir of Mutsuo Takahashi, in which the prominent poet describes his youth and sexual coming of age against the backdrop of the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. Yukio Mishima wrote glowingly of this book’s “firm prose that shines with a dark luster much like a set of drawers crafted by a master of old,” and praised it for its “marvelous sense of perception.” (No publisher)

• Andrea Lingenfelter’s translation from the Chinese of Annie Baobei’s novel Padma, the story of two disaffected city-dwellers who set out on a quest-like trek in a rugged and remote area of Tibet. Baobei (pen name of Li Jie) first came to prominence as an Internet writer in 1998 and since then has become one of China’s most popular writers, noted for her candid portrayal of alienated urban youth. (No publisher)

• Jessica Moore’s translation from the French of Jean-François Beauchemin’s 2004 novel Turkana Boy. Written in poetic prose fragments veined with rich and often startling language and surrealistic imagery, Turkana Boy depicts a father’s grief after the unexplained disappearance of his twelve-year-old son. Its author has been called “one of the best-kept secrets of Québécois literature.” (No publisher).

• Sean Redmond’s translation from the medieval Latin of Felix Fabri’s 1483 travel memoir Another Holy Land: Felix Fabri’s Voyage to Medieval Egypt. Never before translated into English, Books 8 and 9 of Fabri’s celebrated Wanderings in the Holy Land contain a fascinating description of Egypt and especially Cairo, “the largest city of the entire world”: “There was . . . such a clamor and crowding of men that I cannot describe it. So many lights and torches, so much dancing about, as if it were the joy of all the world and not just in this one place but in every quarter.” (No publisher)

• Mira Rosenthal’s translation of Colonies, 77 sonnets by the young Polish poet Tomasz Rózycki, including “Her Majesty’s Fleet”: “I played alone against the computer. I was/ king of a poor country in Central Europe / that became a superpower thanks to my sound /politics and trade . . .” (No publisher)

• Damion Searls’s translation of The Freeloader and other stories by the classic Dutch writer Nescio. Latin for “I don’t know,” Nescio was the pen name of J.H.F. Grönloh, (1882-1961), co-director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company. He is one of the world’s great portrayers of enthusiasm, optimism and the sheer joy of artists in their youth. Long recognized as one of the most important writers in the Dutch language, Nescio has never before been translated into English. (No publisher).

• Simon Wickham-Smith’s translation from the Mongolian of The Battle for Our Land Has Begun, poems and political writings by Ochirbatyn Dashbalbar (1957-1999). Already a popular literary figure when he was elected to the Great State Khural in Mongolia’s first democratic elections (1992), Dashbalbar’s passionate concern for the preservation of Mongolia’s culture and heritage led to a dovetailing of the poetic and the political in his life and work. A few months before his death, he began to fear he was being poisoned by agents of the state; the cause of his death remains unknown. (Dashbalbar Foundation, Mongolia / no U.S. publisher)