June 18, 2024

6:00 PM

The 37th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony took place on Tuesday, June 18th at The Strand’s Rare Book Room in New York City. The evening served to celebrate this year’s winning translators for their outstanding French-to-English translations, in fiction and nonfiction. Winners received awards totaling $20,000 thanks to the generous support of the Florence Gould Foundation. Acknowledgement was also bestowed to our finalists for their translations of exceptional quality. The Foundation was honored to welcome members of the Prize’s jury, as well as keynote speaker Jonathan W. Galassi (Chairman and Executive Editor of Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Read a recap of this year’s ceremony

About the Keynote Speaker:

Jonathan W. Galassi is the Chairman and Executive Editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A lifelong editor, he has been at Farrar, Strays & Giroux since 1986, publishing a wide range of writers—novelists, essayists, and poets, among them many works in translation. He was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication in 2014. He has written four books of poems, including The Vineyard, which will be published in 2026, and two novels. His work in translation has been in Italian, and he has published versions of authors such as Eugeno Montale, Giacomo Leopardi, Primo Levi. He is currently working on a translation of Montale’s later poetry.

About the Winners:

Fiction Winner: Frank Wynne, for his translation of The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Énard (New Directions Publishing)

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.

Nonfiction Winners: Angela Hunter & Rebecca Wilkin, for their co-translation of Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Selections by Louise Dupin (Oxford University Press)

Angela Hunter (L) 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 (R) 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. 

Read more about this year’s winners

Recap of last year’s ceremony