May 22, 2014

6:00PM

The French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation held the 27th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony at the Century Association in New York. The event included a panel discussion that focused on the role of small presses in publishing works in translation. Learn more about our featured panelists below.

The French-American Foundation announced the Fiction and Non-Fiction Translation Awards for the best translation from French into English published in 2013. The winning translators were presented with $10,000 prizes, generously funded by the Florence Gould Foundation.

Learn more about our winners

Panel Discussion

How Small Presses Are Making Translation Big

• Esther Allen, Associate Professor, Baruch College, City University of New York
• Judith Gurewich, Publisher, Other Press
• Karen Phillips, Executive Director, Words Without Borders

The discussion was moderated by Charles Kolb, President of the French-American Foundation.

Esther Allen‘s next book is a translation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 classic Zama, forthcoming from New York Review Books Classics. She is co-editor, with Susan Bernofsky, of In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means (Columbia University Press, 2013).Allen has translated Javier Marias, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernandez, Flaubert, Rosario Castellanos, Blaise Cendrars, Marie Darrieussecq, and Jose Marti. She is currently an associate professor at Baruch College (CUNY). She was co-founder of the PEN World Voices Festival and directed the work of the PEN Translation Fund from 2003-2010. Allen has received a Fulbright Grant (1989), two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships (1995 and 2011), and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters (2006).

Judith Gurewich is the publisher of Other Press, a position she has held since 2002. Under her leadership, Other Press has become a highly-respected and award-winning publisher of literary fiction and non-fiction, including titles such as How to Live (winner of the NBCC for biography), Hurry Down Sunshine, and The Glass Room. Born in Canada and raised in Belgium, she holds a law degree from Brussels University as well as a master’s of law from Columbia University and a PhD in sociology from Brandeis University. She now resides in Cambridge, MA. Judith is also a Lacanian trained psychoanalyst, practicing part time.

Karen Phillips is the Executive Director of Words without Borders, an organization that promotes cultural understanding through the translation, publication, and promotion of contemporary international literature (wordswithoutborders.org). Previously, she worked at the Americas Society, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and freeDimensional, and as a consultant for cultural organizations in Latin America, African, and Europe. Karen holds an M.P.A. in international nonprofit management from NYU Wagner and a B.A. in Spanish literature and art history from Smith College. She is the recipient of a Robert Bosch Foundation fellowship (2011) and a Federal Language and Area Studies grant (2009), which supported her studies of cultural policy and language in Germany and Brazil.

Learn more about the Translation Prize