Meet the 2017 Judges for the Italian Prose in Translation Award!

Meet the 2017 Judges for the Italian Prose in Translation Award!

The Italian Prose in Translation Award (IPTA), inaugurated in 2015, recognizes the importance of contemporary Italian prose (fiction and literary non-fiction) and promotes the translation of Italian works into English. This $5000 prize is awarded annually to a translator of a recent work of Italian prose (fiction or literary non-fiction).

The deadline to submit pieces to the IPTA is April 7, 2017.

The judges for this year’s Italian Prose in Translation Award are Elizabeth Harris, Jim Hicks, and Olivia Sears. Learn more about them below:

elizabeth-harris_iptaElizabeth Harris holds MFAs in fiction-writing and literary translation from the University of Arkansas. She translates Italian fiction, with translations appearing in over forty journals. Her translated books are Mario Rigoni Stern’s Giacomo’s Seasons (Autumn Hill); Giulio Mozzi’s This Is the Garden (Open Letter); and Antonio Tabucchi’s Tristano Dies and the forthcoming For Isabel: A Mandala (Archipelago). Her awards include a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and the National Translation Award for Prose, both for Tabucchi’s Tristano Dies. A professor of creative writing for many years, Harris now translates full-time. This spring, she will be Translator-in-Residence at the University of Iowa.


Jim Hicks is executive editor of the Massachusetts Review. He has also served as chair and jim-hicks1_lucien-strykgraduate program director of Comparative Literature at UMass, Amherst. His translations include short pieces by Italo Calvino, Ananda Devi, Semezdin Mehmedinović, Juan José Saer, Izet Sarajlić, Antonio Tabucchi, and several longer works by Erri De Luca. His Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2013.


Olivia E. Sears is board president and founder olivia-sears_iptaof the Center for the Art of Translation. She co-founded the journal Two Lines in 1993 and was its editor for 12 years. Sears has a BA in Humanities from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Italian literature from Stanford University. As a translator of Italian poetry, she focuses on modern women’s poetry and the poetry of war. Recent translations include work by Patrizia Cavalli, Tiziano Rossi, Chandra Livia Candiani, Eva Taylor, Patrizia Vicinelli, Maria d’Arezzo, and Ardengo Soffici. She serves on the board of the Center for Writers and Translators in Paris.