Voting members of the 2009 Advisory Board: Sara Bershtel, Edwin Frank, Michael Henry Heim, Michael Moore, Richard Sieburth and Jeffrey Yang. Esther Allen guided the Board’s deliberations without a vote.

Eric Abrahamsen for My Spiritual Homeland by Wang Xiaobo (1952–1997), a collection of penetrating, funny, and breathtakingly frank essays written 15 years after the Cultural Revolution by one of China’s most insightful and controversial writers. (No publisher)

Mee Chang for Garden of Youth (1981) by Oh Junghee, a series of powerful stories that center on the struggles of domestic life during the Korean War, by a writer widely recognized as the master of the Korean short story. (No publisher)

Robyn Creswell for The Clash of Images (1995) by Abdelfattah Kilito, a hybrid bildungsroman, written in French, set in the medina of an unnamed Moroccan city. Growing up in a traditional world where the image is taboo, the protagonist is seduced by new American technologies of the image. (Forthcoming from New Directions in fall 2010)

Brett Foster for Elemental Rebel: The Rime of Cecco Angiolieri (1260–1310[?]), a selection of impudent sonnets by a Sienese rival of Dante with a penchant for parodic wordplay. Individual sonnets have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Italian Poetry Review, Metamorphoses, RHINO, and other journals. (No publisher)

G.M. Goshgarian for The Remnants by Hagop Oshagan (1883-1948), a historic novel widely considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Armenian literature, written in the early 1930s “to save what remained of our people.” (No publisher)

Tess Lewis for Maybe This Time (2006) by Alois Hotschnig, a collection of disquieting stories about the mystery, fluidity, and perils of intimacy, by a prize-winning Austrian writer renowned for his stylistic virtuosity. Winner of a 2010 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. (Forthcoming in the U.K. from Peirene Press in 2011)

Fayre Makeig for Mourning (2006), a selection of free verse poems by H.E. Sayeh, an eminent contemporary Iranian poet whose life and work span many of Iran’s political, cultural, and literary upheavals. “Tell us, heaven, why the rain / pours from your eyes …” (No publisher)

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra for Poems of Kabir, a selection of 60 Hindi padas (songs) by India’s legendary mystic poet saint (1398[?]–1448[?]) who opposed all religious and social orthodoxies and oppositions. “But I’m wasting my time, / Says Kabir, / Even death’s bludgeon / About to crush your head / Won’t wake you up.” (No publisher)

Frederika Randall for Deliver Us from Evil by Luigi Meneghello (1922–2007), a darkly original memoir, ordered by theme rather than chronology, set in rural Italy when the Church and Il Duce ruled. The savage immediacy of childhood perception combines with amused and astutely ironic insights in an unsentimental human comedy. (Forthcoming in 2011 from Northwestern University Press)

Daniel Shapiro for Missing Persons, Animals and Artists (1999) by Roberto Ransom, a short story collection by an acclaimed young Mexican writer which explores the enigmas of art and the creative process with gentle irony and whimsical, at times fantastical, premises. Winner of a 2010 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. (No publisher)

Chantal Wright for A Handful of Water (2008), poems written in Germanby Tzveta Sofronieva, a young Bulgarian-born poet, trained as a physicist and science historian, who also writes in Bulgarian and English. Joseph Brodsky said of her, “Listen carefully … She has something to say.” (No publisher)