June 03, 2021
Translation Prize Awards Ceremony
RSVP
The French-American Foundation hosted a virtual celebration of the 2021 Translation Prize winners on Thursday, June 3 at 1:00pm ET. The winners, joined with other notable literary professionals, shared thoughts on their works and the art of translation. The event was guided by special guest Cole Swensen, translator, editor, copywriter, professor, and 2020 Translation Prize finalist in the fiction category for her translation of Jean Frémon’s Now, Now, Louison. Tess Lewis, Essayist, translator, and Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review, moderated the event.
Since 1986, the French-American Foundation, with the longstanding support of the Florence Gould Foundation, has awarded an annual prize for the best translation from French to English in both fiction and nonfiction. The winners of the 2021 Prize will be announced shortly. Learn more about this year’s winners and finalists.
Cole Swensen: Cole Swensen is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017), Gave (Omnidawn, 2017), and Landscapes on a Train (Nightboat 2015), and a volume of critical essays. Her poetic collections turn around specific research projects, including ones on public parks, visual art, illuminated manuscripts, and ghosts. Her work has won the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and the founding editor of La Presse Poetry (www.lapressepoetry.com). She teaches at Brown University.
Tess Lewis: Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Klaus Merz, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Christine Angot, Pascal Bruckner and Jean-Luc Benoziglio. She has been awarded grants from PEN USA, PEN UK, and the NEA, a Max Geilinger Translation Grant for her translation of Philippe Jaccottet, the ACFNY Translation Prize and the 2017 PEN Translation Prize for her translation of the novel Angel of Oblivion by the Austrian writer Maja Haderlap, and most recently a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.