Reading list: ALTA National Translation Award winners

The National Translation Award by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is awarded every year to an exceptional translation of a book published in U.S. or Canada during the previous year. Publishers are asked to nominate the works.

Works of fiction, poetry, drama, and creative non-fiction (except literary criticism and philosophy) are all considered for the award. The criteria for judging the books are the significance of both the original literary work and the translation and the success of the translation in recreating the original. The winning translator receives a prize money of $5,000.

2010 Alex Zucker, for his translation from Czech of All This Belongs to Me by Petra Hůlová (Northwestern University Press)

2009 Norman R. Shapiro, for the anthology French Women Poets of Nine Centuries: The Distaff and the Pen (Johns Hopkins University Press)

2008 Richard Wilbur, for The Theatre of Illusion by French dramatist Pierre Corneille (Mariner Books)

2007 Joel Agee, for his translation from German of The Selected Writings of Friedrich Dürrenmatt (University of Chicago Press)

2006 Ellen Elias-Bursac for her translation of David Albahri's Serbian novel Götz and Meyer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

2005 Vincent Katz for his translation of The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius from Latin (Princeton University Press)

2004 Aron Aji for his translation of The Garden of the Departed Cats by Turkish writer Bilge Karasu (New Directions)

2003 Jo Anne Engelbert for her translation from Spanish of Roberto Sosa's The Return of the River (Curbstone Press)

2002 E.H. and A.M. Blackmore for their translation from French of Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition (University of Chicago Press)

2001 Danuta Borchardt for her translation from the Polish of Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz (Yale University Press)

2000 Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Lin, for Chu T'ien-Wen's Notes of a Desolate Man (Columbia University Press)

1999 Peter Constantine, for Anton Chekhov's The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories (Seven Stories Press)

1998 Carolyn Tipton, for Rafael Alberti's To Painting (Northwestern University Press)


Sources:
ALTA
The University of Texas at Dallas
Wikipedia