Each year, between four and six $1,000 fellowships are awarded to emerging (unpublished or minimally published) translators to help them pay for hotel and travel expenses to the annual ALTA conference. This year, with the ALTA conference held jointly online and in-person, ten Virtual Travel Fellows, including two Peter K. Jansen Fellows, were awarded $500 each. 2021 marks the sixth year of the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellowship, preferentially awarded to an emerging translator of color or a translator working from an underrepresented diaspora or stateless language.
This year’s winners were selected by judges Mui Poopoksakul, Lawrence Schimel, and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler. The 2021 ALTA Travel Fellowships are made possible thanks to the generous support of ALTA’s Past Presidents Council, the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fund, and numerous individual donors, including established translators and other devoted supporters of the craft and art of literary translation.
ALTA will celebrate this year’s Virtual Travel Fellows with a live virtual reading on October 17, 2021 at 5:00pm Pacific Time, hosted by 2009 Travel Fellow Robin Myers. The reading is free and open to the public; registration is required to access our virtual platform. (There is a free ticket option for events like this one.)
Congratulations to these exceptional emerging translators, chosen from among many applicants!
Fatemeh Madani Sarbarani, 2021 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Virtual Travel Fellow (Persian)
Fatemeh Madani Sarbarani is an Iranian translator and playwright. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance of the Americas from Arizona State University. She translated two Argentinian plays The Walls and Antigona Furiosa by Geiselda Gambaro and an Iraqi play Baghdad Bathhouse by Jawad Al-Asadi into Persian. Moreover, she translated an Iranian play Tomb Dwellers by Hossein Kiyani into English as a part of her PhD dissertation. Learn more about Fatemeh here.
Anushka Sen, 2021 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Virtual Travel Fellow (Bengali)
Anushka is an Indian international PhD candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington. She studies animal presence and spatial dynamics in modernist literature and translates from Bengali, her native language. She is most drawn to the minutiae and cadences of poetry but has recently ventured into the wide-open field of fiction. Learn more about Anushka here.
Michelle Kyoko Crowson, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Japanese)
Michelle Kyoko Crowson is a Japanese American writer and translator based out of the Pacific Northwest. She was awarded the 2019 Kyoko Selden Memorial Prize for her manuscript translation of Akiko Akazome’s Akutagawa Award-winning novel, The Maiden’s Betrayal. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Learn more about Michelle here.
Christine Gutman, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (French)
Paris-based translator Christine Gutman holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She translates primarily from French to English and occasionally from German and Yiddish. Her first book-length literary translation, Papers by Violaine Schwartz, will be published by Fern Books in 2022. Learn more about Christine here.
Lara Norgaard, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish)
Lara Norgaard is an essayist and translator of Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish into English. Her work has appeared in publications including Asymptote Journal, Public Books, The Jakarta Post, and Cuíer (Two Lines Press), and she is a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Grant recipient. Currently, she is a PhD student in comparative literature at Harvard University researching post-dictatorship literatures. Learn more about Lara here.
Calvin Olsen, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Portuguese)
Calvin Olsen is a poet and translator based in Scotland. He holds an MFA from Boston University and is currently a PhD student in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at NC State University. His work has appeared in AGNI, Asymptote, The London Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, and many others. Learn more about Calvin here.
Marielle Sutherland, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (German)
Marielle Sutherland is a freelance German-English translator and former lecturer in German Studies. She has a PhD in German and a Diploma in Translation. She has published a co-translation of poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke with OUP, translations in the literary journals InTranslation and Alchemy, and contributions in non-fiction books in the arts and humanities. Learn more about Marielle here.
Yilin Wang, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Mandarin Chinese)
Yilin Wang (she/they) is a writer, editor, and Chinese-English translator. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Samovar, Pathlight, China Channel, and the anthology The Way Spring Arrives (Tor). Their writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy, and Words Without Borders, and been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Learn more about Yilin here.
Candice Whitney, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Italian)
Candice Whitney is a writer and international education professional, based in New Jersey. She has been an invited speaker an curator of events about literature and Blackness in Italy at universities. Learn more about Candice here.
Anam Zafar, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Arabic, French)
Anam Zafar translates from Arabic and French so that misrepresented communities can tell their own stories on their own terms. In 2021, she was an Emerging Translators Mentee and translator in residence with the National Centre for Writing in the UK. She volunteers for World Kid Lit and is trained to lead creative translation workshops for young people. Learn more about Anam here.
The following applicants are here honorably mentioned as this year’s Virtual Travel Fellowship finalists:
Barbara Ofosu-Somuah
Christina Ng
Jennifer Shyue
Kaylee Lockett
Kaylen Baker
Congratulations to this year’s Virtual Travel Fellows! The Travel Fellows reading will be free and open to the public, but we hope you’ll check out the ALTA44: Inflection Points schedule, and register for this year’s conference, which kicks off next Thursday, September 30.