NEA Announces Fellows for 2015 Literary Translation

The NEA has announced their 2015 Literature Translation Fellows!

Literary translators undertake the challenging task of bringing the authors who are renowned in their own countries to a new audience, exposing readers to global experiences, deep insights, as well as surprise connections. Today, the National Endowment for the Arts announced its latest efforts to support literary translation through $300,000 in recommended grants to 20 translators to support the new translation of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry from 12 different languages into English. This announcement coincides with the NEA's release of The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation, a collection of essays exploring the art and importance of literary translation.

Projects being supported this year include a $25,000 fellowship to Jeffrey Yang to support the translation from the Chinese of City Gate Open Up, a lyrical autobiogaphy by poet Bei Dao. And among many other notable writers translating in a language outside English, Rosa Alcalá will be working on The Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña:

To support the translation from the Spanish of poems by Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña for an anthology of selected works. The anthology will feature poems from more than ten books and guide the reader through four decades of Vicuña's career. It will include an array of interconnected themes, from poems that explore the three‐dimensionality of the quipu, a pre‐Colombian writing system of corded knots, to poems that unpack Quechua, English, and Spanish to reveal, in their etymologies, the interconnectedness of histories and cultures.

The full 2015 Fellowship recipient list and project descriptions can be found here.