2024 Translation Prize Winners
May 14, 2024
The French-American Foundation is excited to announce the winners of the 2024 Translation Prize. For nearly 40 years, the French-American Foundation has awarded an annual prize for exceptional translations from French to English in both fiction and nonfiction, thanks to the generous support of the Florence Gould Foundation.
Out of over 80 submissions total, from which 10 impressive finalists were chosen, our jury selected two outstanding French-to-English translations as winners of this year’s prize.
To celebrate our winners and their achievement, the Foundation will hold an Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, June 18th, 2024 at 6:00 PM ET at the Strand Bookstore’s Rare Book Room in New York City. Winners will receive awards totaling $20,000, funded generously by the Florence Gould Foundation, and will be joined by other notable literary professionals to share their thoughts on their work and the art of translation and answer questions from the audience. The Foundation also has the honor of welcoming keynote speaker Jonathan W. Galassi, poet, translator, and Chairman of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
The Awards Ceremony is free and open to the public. Registration is required to attend.
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FICTION
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NONFICTION
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About Frank Wynne
Frank Wynne is an Irish literary translator, writer and editor. He has translated numerous French and Hispanic authors including Michel Houellebecq, Ahmadou Kourouma, Javier Cercas and Virginie Despentes. His work has earned him a number of awards, most recently the 2022 Dublin Literary Award for his translation of The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter. He was chair of the jury for the 2022 International Booker Prize, and is an advisory editor to The Paris Review.
About the book: To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to understand the essence of the local culture, the intrepid young scholar scurries around restlessly on his moped to interview residents. But what David doesn’t yet know is that here, in this seemingly ordinary place, once the stage for wars and revolutions, Death leads a dance: when one thing perishes, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human, or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. And once a year, Death and the living observe a temporary truce during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, drink, and language […].
About Angela Hunter (L) and Rebecca Wilkin (R):
Angela Hunter is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock where she teaches British and comparative literature, literary theory, and gender studies. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature (Emory University) and an MA in French Literature (New York University). She has published on Louise Dupin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Stendhal in various venues. Her co-translation (with Michael Johnson) of Le Parjure by Henri Thomas is forthcoming in Perjury: A Critical Edition (Rowman & Littlefield). She is currently working on a historical fiction project about salons in 18th-century Paris. Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Selections was supported by a Scholarly Translations and Editions grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Rebecca Wilkin is Professor of French at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington and holds a PhD in French from the University of Michigan. At PLU, she teaches in multiple programs: French & Francophone Studies, Global Studies, and the International Honors program. She is the author of Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France (Ashgate 2008) and of many articles on Descartes and Cartesianism, early modern women philosophers, and early modern feminist thought. With Domna Stanton (Graduate Center, CUNY), she edited and translated selections from the work of Gabrielle Suchon (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Dupin’s Work on Women is thus her second collaborative translation – but her first experience conducting archival research to reconstruct a work from manuscripts. This project was generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
About the book: The eighteenth-century text Work on Women by Louise Dupin (also known as Madame Dupin, 1706-1799) is the French Enlightenment’s most in-depth feminist analysis of inequality—and its most neglected one. Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin here offer the first-ever edition of selected translations of Dupin’s massive project, developed from manuscript drafts. Hunter and Wilkin provide helpful introductions to the four sections of Work on Women (Science, History and Religion, Law, and Education and Mores) which contextualize Dupin’s arguments and explain the work’s construction–including the role of her secretary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau […] This volume fills an important gap in the history of feminist thought and will appeal to readers eager to hear new voices that challenge established narratives of intellectual history.
Book descriptions courtesy of respective publishers.
Thank you to our jury for all of their hard work and helping make the Translation Prize possible!
Pictured left to right: Chris Clarke, Tess Lewis, Sandra Smith, Kate Deimling, James Swenson, and Corine Tachtiris (virtual).
And congratulations to our finalists for being shortlisted for the Prize.
Fiction
- Daniel Levin Becker, for his translation of The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier (Transit Books)
- Teresa Lavender Fagan, for her translation of Down with the Poor! by Shumona Sinha (Deep Vellum)
- Jessica Moore, for her translation of Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal (Archipelago Books)
- Raymond MacKenzie, for his translation of Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man by Gustave Flaubert (University of Minnesota Press)
Nonfiction
- Juliette Rogers, for her translation of The Gender of Capital by Céline Bessière & Sibylle Gollac (Harvard University Press)
- Susan Spitzer, for her translation of Images of the Present Time by Alain Badiou (Columbia University Press)
- Sean Field, for his translation of To Govern is to Serve by Jacques Dalarun (Cornell University Press)
- Ryan Bloom, for his translation of Travels in the Americas by Albert Camus (University of Chicago Press)