Founded in 1996, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation recognizes book-length translations of poetry from any language into English. The award confers a $3,000 prize to the translator of the winning book. Eligible books may have up to two translators.
All winners, finalists, and longlisters for this award are eligible to receive PEN America’s official emblems. If you are a publisher and interested in obtaining PEN America’s award emblem, please write to [email protected]. For more information, please visit our FAQ page.
Submissions open from June 1 – August 1, 2024 for books published in the 2024 calendar year.
2024 Winner
For a book-length translation of poetry from any language into English.
Judges: Nancy Naomi Carlson, Matthias Göritz, Dorothy Bonett
The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer, Tomas Tranströmer (Copper Canyon Press)
Translated from the Swedish by Patty Crane
Bookshop
From the judges’ citation: “Patty Crane’s translations in The Blue House brilliantly present one of the greatest poetic voices of the past sixty years. Written in Swedish, Tomas Tranströmer’s work, full of cinematic imagery and wisdom, is deeply informed by his spirituality. We were equally impressed and touched by Tranströmer’s lyricism in both his early long poems and his wonderful later haiku sequences. His poems are innovative without overtly striving to be different or clever. Yet there is a profound historical sense encoded within them and the poet is not afraid to face hard historical facts. The homage these verses pay to the past, including historical figures, as well as to the fragility of life, transcend time and place, and are aesthetically grounded in our own time. Crane’s English translations get across all the nuances of Tranströmer’s solitary achievement. As she follows the supple rhythms and musicality of the original, and even more importantly, replicates the tone of Tranströmer’s often minimalistic, yet metaphysical verse, Crane and her translations leave us wonderstruck.”
History
2023 The Loose Pearl by Paula Ilabaca Nuñez translated from Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky (Coimpress)
2019 Richard Sieburth for his translation from the French of A Certain Plume by Henri Michaux (NYRB)
2014 Karen Emmerich & Edmund Keeley, Diaries of Exile by Yannis Ritsos (Archipelago)
2012 Jen Hofer, Negro Marfil/ Ivory Black by Myriam Moscona (Les Figues Press)
2011 Khaled Mattawa, Adonis: Selected Poems by Adonis and Khaled Mattawa (Yale University Press)
2010 Anne Carson, An Orestia by Auschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (Faber & Faber)
2009 Marilyn Hacker, King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
2008 Rosmarie Waldrop, Lingos I-IX by Ulf Stolterfoht (Burning Deck)
2007 David Hinton, The Selected Poems of Wang Wei by Wang Wei (New Directions)
2006 Wilson Baldridge, Recumbents by Michel Deguy (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
2005 Pierre Joris, Lightduress by Paul Celan (Green Integer)
2004 Peter Cole, J’Accuse by Aharon Shabtal (New Directions)
2003 Khaled Mattawa, Without an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef (Graywolf)
2002 Anne Twitty, Islandia by Maria Negroni (Station Hill)
2001 Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, Open Closed Open by Yehuda Amicha (Harcourt)
2000 James Brasfield and Oleh Lysheha, The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute)
1999 Richard Zenith, Fernando Pessoa & Co (Grove)
1998 Eamon Grennan, Selected Poems by Giacomo Leopardi (Princeton)
1997 Edward Snow, Uncollected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
1996 Guy Davenport, editor and translator, 7 Greeks (New Directions)
Eligibility
Who is Eligible:
- Eligible titles must be original book-length poetry translations, by a single original author, published between January 1 and December 31 of the applicable calendar year by a U.S. trade publisher.
- Eligible books may have up to two translators but are limited to one original author.
- Eligible books must be previously published in a language other than English.
- Translators may be of any nationality. U.S. residency or citizenship is not required.
- Books may have no more than two translators.
- If you submit a book for this award, you may not submit it for any additional PEN America Literary Awards, with the exception of the PEN Open Book Award. Please note that the PEN/Faulkner Award is not considered a PEN America Literary Award.
NOT Eligible:
- Prose (nonfiction or fiction).
- Reprints or retranslations, unless the work can be said to provide a significant revision of the original translation.
- Books with more than two translators.
- Translations-in-progress are not accepted; to submit a translation-in-progress, please see the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants.
Submission Guidelines
- All submitted books must be published by a trade or academic publisher between January 1 and December 31 in the applicable year. Self-published books are ineligible for the PEN America Literary Awards.
- Books with more than one original author are ineligible for the PEN America Literary Awards.
- PEN America will only accept submissions from publishers or literary agents. Authors may not submit their own books.
- On the submission form, please select the award you are submitting to.
- Submissions of a book to multiple awards is allowed only in the case of the PEN Open Book Award. Please complete a separate submission for this award if applicable.
- Please submit verified email addresses on the submission form. Your order cannot be processed without an email address. Additional contacts are required so that we may be in contact directly if an author or translator is selected as a longlister, finalist, and/or winner.
- Upload a PDF file of the galley or final manuscript on the book submissions form. Book award submissions will be read as PDF files. Please upload the file saved as BOOKTITLE_AUTHORNAME. For the judges’ convenience, please upload a book file WITHOUT watermarks. Each book file will be kept confidentially between the Literary Awards team and the awards judges. Please note that if a book is longlisted, PEN America may request a physical copy be sent to the judging panel.
- Upload a high-resolution book jacket photo. This may be used later if the book is longlisted, a finalist, or a winner.
- Each submission is $85. Submission fees are not refundable. Please note that all payments must be made via the submission form.
- Submission fees may be waived for publishers whose annual net sales are less than $2 million. You may request an exemption here—this form asks for a letter on company letterhead stating that the press’s annual net sales are less than $2 million. Do not submit your title before requesting your fee exemption, as the Literary Awards Team will provide you with an alternative submission method.
- Once the submitted book is received and reviewed for eligibility by PEN America, it will be passed along to the judges. Please add [email protected] to your address book, as it will be the main point of contact from PEN America.