The National Translation Award is awarded annually in poetry and in prose to literary translators who have made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality. The NTA is the oldest prize for a work of literary translation in English, and the only one to include an evaluation of the source language text.
Submissions for the National Translation Award in Poetry are being accepted until April 7, 2017. This year’s judges are Ani Gjika, Katrina Øgaard Jensen, and Gregory Racz. Learn more about them here:
Ani Gjika is an Albanian-American poet, literary translator, teacher, and author of Bread on Running Waters (2013). She is the recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global fellowship and an NEA grant for her translation of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s, Negative Space, forthcoming from New Directions. Gjika’s poems have been featured in fishousepoems.org, Plume, Seneca Review, Salamander, and elsewhere. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote Journal, AGNI Online, Ploughshares, World Literature Today, Tupelo Quarterly and elsewhere.
Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a translator and writer. She is one of the founding editors 
of EuropeNow, a journal of research and art published by the Council for European Studies at Columbia University, and a returning judge for the Best Translated Book Award (Fiction 2015, Poetry 2016, Poetry 2017). She previously served as editor in chief of the Columbia Journal and blog editor at Asymptote and Words Without Borders. Her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s award-winning poetry collection Third-Millennium Heart (Action Books & Broken Dimanche Press) is forthcoming in May 2017.
Gary Racz is professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at LIU Brooklyn, review editor for Translation Review, and a former president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). He has published seven volumes in translation of the Peruvian poet Eduardo Chirinos, of which The Smoke of Distant Fires was short-listed for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The Golden Age of Spanish Drama: A Norton Critical Edition, in which his translations of plays by Cervantes, Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz appear, is forthcoming this year.
