PEN America is thrilled to showcase the work of recipients of the 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund. Each week through the fall, we'll feature excerpts from winning projects along with essays by the translators on what drew them to a particular piece and why their work matters now. The Fund, which awards grants of $2,000-$4,000 to promote the publication and reception of translated world literature in English, received a total of 171 applications, spanning a wide array of languages of origin, including Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Chinese, Czech, Hindi, Yiddish, and more.
Since 2009, the Fund's annual contribution for grant awards has been augmented by support from Amazon.
Gabriel Amor for his translation of Juana I by Ana Azourmanian; Ellen Cassedy for her strong translation of On the Landing: Selected Stories by Yenta Mash; Chris Clarke for his translation of Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob; Sharon Dolin for her translation of the award-winning Book of Minutes by Gemma Gorga; Kaiama L. Glover for her translation of Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre, a prizewinning work of social satire; Anita Gopalan for her translation of Simsim by Geet Chaturvedi.; Amanda Lee Koe for her translation of Ten Years of Marriage by Su Qing; Karen Leeder for her translation of Thick of It by Ulrika Almut Sandig; Rachel McNicholl for her translation of Operation Hinterland: Tales from the Silver Scrapheap, the debut novel of Austrian writer Anita Augustin; Alicia Maria Meier for her translation of The Sky According to Google by Marta Carnicero Hernanz, a contemporary Catalan author; Emma Ramadan for her translation of Les Persiennes by Ahmed Bouanani; Corine Tachtiris for her translation of Dark Love, a powerful depiction of the psychology of sexual abuse, written in a grotesque allegorical style by the Czech feminist author Alexandra Berková (1949–2008); Russell Scott Valentino for his translation of Kin by Miljenko Jergović, a sprawling family saga from one of the central figures in post-Yugoslav literature, translated from the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian; Jeffrey Zuckerman for his translation of The Complete Stories of Hervé Guibert. Zuckerman’s translation brings together stories that span fourteen years of writing by one of France’s most iconic gay writers and photographers, an enfant terrible, from a visceral self-portrait at twenty-one to posthumously published stories reflecting on art, lust, and life.
See the details of the award here