Beth Fowler, winner of the 2010 prize for Spanish to English, kicks off the partnership between the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize and Crossing Border, an annual showcasing of young, exciting, international writing talent which takes place in the Netherlands and Belgium each November. You can read more about Crossing Border here, and you’ll find Beth’s first contribution to the project here.
The winner of the 2011 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize was announced at an event at The Gallery, Foyles, Charing Cross Road on 28 September 2011.
Wiam El-Tamami, of Cairo, a freelance editor of literary translation at the American University of Cairo Press, received a cheque for £1000 along with, Foyles tokens, a selection of Harvill Secker titles and a year’s subscription to Banipal magazine. Wiam will also participate in the 2012 Crossing Border Festival. Details about next year’s prize will be announced in 2012.
Picture - Wiam El-Tamami (centre) with judges Maya Jaggi (left) and Briony Everroad (right).
To read the winning entry and a special feature about the prize, please visit Granta.
To see photos from the prize-giving reception visit flickr.com/photos/vintage_books
Wiam El-Tamami said: 'I’m thrilled! The story was a wonderful choice for a translation competition — it presented just enough technical challenges while leaving plenty of room for creative interpretation. I really enjoyed travelling through the author’s text and mine to find the right mood, voice and style.'
Prize founder and judge, Briony Everroad, commented, ‘We were very pleased to receive a total of 92 entries from all around the world, and we received some very promising entries. Wiam not only rose to the challenges of the text, fully comprehending the author's Arabic, but also produced a beautiful piece of writing. The translation displayed an elegance of style alongside fidelity to the Arabic original, yet the story is wonderfully articulated in the translator’s own voice.’
About the Prize
The Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize was launched in 2010 as part of Harvill Secker's centenary celebrations. It is an annual prize, which focuses on a different language each year, with the aim of recognising the achievements of young translators at the start of their careers. The prize is open to anyone between the ages of 16 and 34, with no restriction on country of residence. For the 2011 prize Harvill Secker teamed up with Foyles, and the prize was kindly supported by Banipal. The chosen language was Arabic, and entrants were asked to translate the short story ‘Layl Qouti' by Mansoura Ez Eldin.
Egyptian novelist and journalist Mansoura Ez Eldin was born in Delta Egypt in 1976. She studied journalism at the Faculty of Media, Cairo University and has since published short stories in various newspapers and magazines: she published her first collection of short stories, Shaken Light, in 2001. This was followed by two novels, Maryam's Maze in 2004 and Beyond Paradise in 2009. Her work has been translated into a number of languages, including an English translation of Maryam's Maze by the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press. In 2010, she was selected for the Beirut39, as one of the 39 best Arab authors below the age of 40. Her second novel Wara’a al-Fardoos (Beyond Paradise) was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arabic Booker) 2010. She was also a participant of the inaugural nadwa (writers’ workshop) held by the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in Abu Dhabi in 2009 and was a mentor at the second nadwa in October 2010.
If you have any queries, please contact us on:
youngtranslatorsprize@randomhouse.co.uk
The judges
Anthony Calderbank (translator)
Anthony Calderbank has been a translator of Arabic literature since the early nineties. He has translated a number of Egyptian novels including Rhadopis of Nubia by Najib Mahfouz, Zaat by Sonallah Ibrahim, and The Tent, Blue Aubergine and Gazelle Tracks by Miral Al-Tahawy, and two novels by Saudi author Yousef Al-Mohaimeed, Wolves of the Crescent Moon and Munira’s Bottle. His translations of short stories include a collection by Nubian writer Haggag Hassan Odoul entitled Nights of Musk: Stories of Old Nubia, and have appeared in a Palestinian collection edited by Nur and Abdulwahab El Messiri entitled Land of Thyme and Stone.
He has contributed to a number of anthologies of modern Arabic Literature including Unbuttoning the Violin (Banipal 2006), the collection Madinah, edited by Joumana Haddad (2008), and the Beirut 39 project. He has also translated numerous pieces for Banipal Magazine. In 2010 he translated an excerpt from Abdo Khal’s novel Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles, which went on to win the Arab Booker Prize.
He has spoken on translation and translation theory at international conferences and cultural gatherings and has conducted translation workshops for the British Council and the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature. His translation of Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s novel Wolves of the Crescent Moon was shortlisted for the 2010 Jan Michalski Prize. He has lived in the Middle East for many years and is currently based in Riyadh Saudi Arabia where he is Deputy Director of the British Council.
Maya Jaggi (journalist)
Maya Jaggi is an award-winning cultural journalist and an influential critic on international literature. Her arts profiles in the Guardian Review over a decade are credited with enhancing understanding of world writers, from Günter Grass, Umberto Eco and Jose Saramago to Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison and Mario Vargas Llosa – as well as British figures such as Jeanette Winterson and Sir Tom Stoppard. The late critic Professor Edward Said described her interview with him as 'in a class of its own'. Her work has appeared widely in periodicals including the Guardian, Independent, Sunday Times Culture, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Economist, TLS and BookForum (New York), and in books such as Lives and Works, Writing Across Worlds and Women of the Revolution. She contributes to BBC radio (including Radio 4’s Any Questions?, Front Row and Open Book) and television.
She has interviewed 12 Nobel prizewinners in literature – as well as Arab writers including Mahmoud Darwish, Hanan al-Shaykh, Elias Khoury, Alaa al-Aswany, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Amin Maalouf. She has been a judge of literary awards including the Orange prize, the David Cohen, the Caine, the Commonwealth Writers prize and the Saif Ghobash-Banipal prize for Arabic literary translation. She was educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, and is an Associate Fellow of Warwick University and a member of English PEN’s Writers in Prison committee.
Penelope Lively (author)
Penelope Lively was born in Cairo, Egypt and spent her childhood there. She came to England at the age of twelve, in 1945, and went to boarding school in Sussex. She subsequently read Modern History at St. Anne's College, Oxford. In 1957 she married Jack Lively (who died in 1998). They had two children, Josephine and Adam. Jack Lively's academic career took the family from Swansea to Sussex and Oxford, and eventually to Warwick University, where he was Professor of Politics. Penelope Lively now has six grandchildren and lives in London.
Briony Everroad (editor)
Briony Everroad is an editor at Harvill Secker, where she publishes authors Jo Nesbø, Karin Fossum, and Andrey Kurkov, among others. She studied English literature at University College London and in 2002 began working at Random House. Always keen to explore new languages, she spent a term studying French at the Sorbonne in 2006 and is currently learning Spanish. In 2010 she founded the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize.
This year’s prize is kindly supported by
www.banipal.co.uk