2023 Translation Prize Winners
May 4, 2023
The French-American Foundation congratulates the winners of the 2023 Translation Prize. Since 1986, the French-American Foundation, with the longstanding support of the Florence Gould Foundation, has awarded an annual prize for exceptional translations from French to English in both fiction and nonfiction.
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FICTION Juliet Sutcliffe,
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NONFICTION Kieran Aarons and Cédrine Michel,
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The Translation Prize Jury selected the winners from a list of ten outstanding finalists.
To celebrate the accomplishments of our winners, the French-American Foundation will host an Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, May 23, 2023 in New York. The winners, joined with other notable literary professionals, will share thoughts on their work and the art of translation, and take questions from the audience. They will receive awards totaling $20,000, generously funded by the Florence Gould Foundation. We will also have the honor of welcoming distinguished keynote speaker Alice Kaplan, Author, Translator, and Sterling Professor of French at Yale University.
The Awards Ceremony is free and open to the public. Please RSVP by clicking below.
About the 2023 Translation Prize Winners
FICTION
Juliet Sutcliffe, for her translation of The Music Game
by Stéfanie Clermont (Biblioasis)
Friends since grade school, Céline, Julie, and Sabrina come of age at the start of a new millennium, supporting each other and drifting apart as their lives pull them in different directions. But when their friend dies by suicide in the abandoned city lot where they once gathered, they must carry on in the world that left him behind—one they once dreamed they would change for the better. […] An ode to friendship and the ties that bind us together, Stéfanie Clermont’s award-winning The Music Game confronts the violence of the modern world and pays homage to those who work in the hope and faith that it can still be made a better place. (source: Biblioasis)
JC Sutcliffe is a writer, translator and editor. She has lived in England, France and Canada. The Music Game is the ninth Québécois novel she has translated.
NONFICTION
Kieran Aarons and Cédrine Michel, for their co-translation of Self Defense: A Philosophy of Violence
by Elsa Dorlin (Verso Books)
Is violent self-defense ethical? In the history of colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, there has long been a dividing line between bodies “worthy of defending” and those who have been disarmed and rendered defenseless. […] Here, philosopher Elsa Dorlin looks across the global history of the left – from slave revolts to the knitting women of the French Revolution and British suffragists’ training in ju-jitsu, from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the Black Panther Party, from queer neighborhood patrols to Black Lives Matter – to trace the politics, philosophy, and ethics of self defense. In this history she finds a “martial ethics of the self”: a practice in which violent self defense is the only means for the oppressed to ensure survival and to build a liveable future. […] (source: Verso Books)
Kieran Aarons teaches philosophy at Governors State University in Chicago. His writings on French, German, and Italian philosophy have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Theory & Event, Journal of Italian Philosophy, and Pólemos. He is currently completing a book on myth and violence in the thought of Furio Jesi.
Cedrine Michel works as a translator and editor for a research organization at Toronto’s York University, where her work focuses on issues of housing and homelessness. As a freelancer, she specializes in philosophy, and her work has been published in Canada, the United States, and the UK, but Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence was her first book project.