National Translator Association

The National Translation Award in Poetry is awarded annually to a literary translator who has made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality.

The winning and finalist books and translators for 2015 will be featured at the 38th annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association in Tucson, AZ.

The National Translation Award (NTA) will be awarded in two categories—Prose and Poetry—beginning in 2015. In it’s 17th year, the $5, 000 NTA is the longest-standing prize for a work of literary translation, and the only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of the source text and its relation to the finished English work.

Publishers are invited to submit translated works of poetry published in 2014. Hybrid works and drama are welcome, and may be submitted to either category as determined appropriate by the publisher.

Nominations must be made through our nomination portal, and open January 1, 2015 and close May 1, 2015. The winning and finalist books and translators for 2015 will be featured at the 38th annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association in Tucson, AZ.

The NTA supports ALTA’s goal of enhancing the status of literary translation, improving the quality of literary translating, and broadening the market for works in English translation. Recent winners include Richard Wilbur (2008), Norman Shapiro (2009), Alex Zucker (2010), Lisa Rose Bradford (2011), Sinan Antoon (2012), Phillip Boehm (2013), Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich (2014). The award-winning book and translator for 2015 will be featured at the 38th annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association in Tucson, AZ.

To be eligible for the 2015 National Translation Award in Poetry, the translation must be:

• by an American citizen or U.S. resident
• from any language into English
• of a book-length work of poetry, prose poetry, or verse drama

The deadline for nominating books published in 2014 is May 1, 2015.

For books chosen by the judges as finalists, publishers will be asked to provide the original-language text; any finalist for which no original-language text is provided will be excluded from further consideration.

Upon completion of the submission, publishers will receive instructions for mailing print copies of submitted titles to those judges who are unable to review electronic submissions. Postmark deadline for mailing printed submissions is May 8, 2015.