American Literary Translators Association

ALTA A L T A

ALTA’s presence at the conference and bookfair would not be possible without the hard work of volunteers! Apply to be a volunteer with ALTA in exchange for conference registration at AWP26 (held March 5-7 in Baltimore, MD) by next Monday, February 2! Learn more and apply here:

The Watchlist: January 2026 - Words Without Borders Tobias Carroll recommends novels from Cameroon, Colombia, Russia, and more, plus the newest from Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk.

Looking for new fiction to read? Check out this January Watchlist, featuring ALTA member Maren Baudet-Lackner’s translation of THE AQUATICS by Osvalde Lewat. At Words Without Borders / @wwborders.bsky.social: buff.ly/dsBoLng

Banipal Trust for Arab Literature - The Banipal Translation Prize - The 2025 Award The Trust supports the deepening and enriching of cultural dialogue between the Arab world and the West (particularly Europe and North America) in order to bring the literature of today's Arab…

“Intensely poetic, yet deeply grounded, Honey Hunger reveals the layers of contemporary Oman through voices that are often unheard.”

Marilyn Booth has won the 2025 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for her translation of Zahran Alqasmi’s HONEY HUNGER. At the Banipal Trust:

🎉 The National Book Critics Circle Awards finalists are here! Congratulations to all on these lists, including ALTA member Paige Aniyah Morris, 2026 ALTA mentor Deepa Bhasthi, and past National Translation Award winner Martin Aitken! www.bookcritics.org/awards/

The 21 Must-Read Books To Have On Your Radar In 2026 Discover the best new books of 2026 with our guide to the most-anticipated new releases each month this year.

Take out your calendars and mark the dates. The Service95 Book Club has released a list of 21 must-read books coming out in 2026, including a translation by ALTA member Izidora Angel. No one’s TBR list is safe! At Service95:

The Literary Horror Novel in Translation That Will Forever Haunt Me This literary horror novel in translation will forever haunt me. It's as nuanced and compelling as it is brutally explicit.

Looking for a horror novel to haunt your dreams? Mariana Enriquez’s OUR SHARE OF NIGHT, translated by Megan McDowell, is just that. Check out S. Zainab Williams’s review of the translation at Book Riot:

Deepa Bhasthi on translation, beyond the world of Heart Lamp Deepa Bhasthi on translation, beyond the world of Heart Lamp

“Translation for me is just one of the ways in which I choose to express myself.”

ALTA 2026 Mentor Deepa Bhasthi shares her thoughts on multilingualism and translation in HEART LAMP and beyond. At t2ONLINE:

An Interview with Jen Calleja - Asymptote I met with Jen Calleja—author, musician and translator from German extraordinaire—at the Edinburgh International Book Festival where she was taking part in two events. In the first, she appeared…

“[I]n a sense, a translator is always like a fan. You’re always in this position of admiration, but you are also emulating the author.”

Sarah Gear interviews translator Jen Calleja on the art, politics, and livelihood of literary translation. At Asymptote: buff.ly/3WmFKtX

Five Poems from Served Waters - Latin American Literature Today The contours are dissolved by the palm.

“Among everything, / the hand searches for skin / stone / water and earth.”

Alec Schumacher, longlisted for the 2020 National Translation Award in Poetry, translates five poems from Carlos Cociña’s SERVED WATERS. At Latin American Literature Today: buff.ly/v5U2Ujd

Dried Seaweed at Midnight - Asymptote I hold my hands aloft.How many hours do people waste in a lifetime over this sort of action?Do I mean people, or do I mean normal people, people who aren’t me?I am sitting on a black, rectangular…

“Whether palm reading or some other method, in the end I think they might all be looking at the same thing. The repetitions of the day-to-day. The evidence of a life.”

Read Heidi Clark’s stunning translation of Nakanishi Morina’s “Dried Seaweed at Midnight” at Asymptote:

Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society - Lecture by Translator Alexis Levitin

Tomorrow, 1/15 ‼️ Join us for 𝑶𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑻𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒔𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒐𝒇 𝑷𝒐𝒆𝒕𝒓𝒚, an *in-person* lecture and discussion led by noted translator Alexis Levitin 💫 #xl8 @littranslate.bsky.social

⏰ January 15, 5:30–7:30 p.m.
📍 At Folio 👉 93 Pike St # 307, Seattle, WA 98101
🙋 Info & RSVP 🔗 notisnet.org/event-6468397

What Have You Been Reading? by Hwang Bo-reum “There are some books we meet in life that feel like falling in love; we think of them all the time.”

Author Hwang Bo-reum reflects on the power of the question “What have you been reading?” in an essay translated by Shanna Tan. At World Literature Today: buff.ly/BkK4hTU

📣 Submissions for the 2026 ALTA awards are open!

Publisher and translators: Submit works published in 2025 to our book prizes 🏆
Emerging translators: Apply to the 2026 Travel Fellowships to get to the ALTA49 conference in Portland, OR ✈️

Submissions close on March 16! Learn more: buff.ly/x2W71cx

Harlequin France is firing its human translators and replacing them with—welp, you guessed it. Harlequin France, which is owned by HarperCollins, has just confirmed that they’re shifting away from human translators with an eye to robot replacements. As The Bookseller reported this morn…

Sharpen your pitchforks and ready your pens, everyone: buff.ly/kXUKTxm

Spend a week in Vermont next June studying the art of literary translation, June 14-20! Feat. faculty including Jennifer Croft and many others, the 12th Annual Bread Loaf Translators' Conference is where to be. Rolling apps close 3/15; financial aid available: buff.ly/ev3zAHQ

Ten questions: Meet professor and literary translator Clyde Moneyhun Clyde Moneyhun, a professor in the Department of Theater, Film and Creative Writing, holds four...

“It’s impossible to translate a poem, but you can make a new poem that’s a kind of performance of the old poem.”

Translator and Professor Clyde Moneyhun answers ten questions about his translation and teaching experiences. Check it out at Boise State News: buff.ly/XQ8PWkX

US poet laureate Arthur Sze on slowing down to translate poetry across cultures As the first Asian-American poet laureate, Sze reflects on Chinese cultural inheritance and poetry’s role beyond borders.

“Poetry works best through its affirmation of humanity. And translation as an endeavour builds bridges. It builds community. It dissolves national borders.”

US Poet Laureate Arthur Sze discusses translating poetry in turbulent times. At the South China Morning Post:

Why We Keep Reading “All Quiet on the Western Front” A new translation vividly renders the sadly evergreen influence of the Erich Maria Remarque’s World War I novel.

Kurt Beals’s new translation of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT highlights the immediacy and youthfulness of the original novel’s narration. Read more about his translation @thenation.com:

How 3,000-year-old poems landed in a top literary magazine With new translations from the long-extinct Hittite language, UChicago Ph.D. student Naomi Harris brought verses from clay tablets to "The Paris Review"

“Translation, like scholarship, is an interpretive process. You have to decide what aspect of a word or a sentence to convey.”

University of Chicago PhD student Naomi Harris shares her experience translating 3000-year-old Hittite poetry into English. At UChicago News:

From us at ALTA: Happy New Year! We wish you all the best -- and hope many translations make their way to your bookshelves! -- in 2026. 🎆🎉

2025 Winter Fundraiser In May, like many in the literary arts community, ALTA lost future funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, as our conference and programming “no longer effectuate[d] agency priorities.”…

Was supporting literary translators one of your 2025 New Year's resolutions? It isn't too late!

You can still make a tax-deductible gift in 2025 & enjoy a great number of benefits (besides the satisfaction of crossing that off your resolution list!) when you do. Make your gift here!

It’s not too late to make a tax-deductible gift to ALTA in 2025. No matter the amount of your gift, it will make a big difference in 2026 and beyond.

We can only do it together.

And when you give this year, you enjoy many benefits! Learn more and make your tax-deductible gift: buff.ly/KbZ9vTF

⏰ Last chance! We still have 49% to go to our goal of $20,000. If you’ve been meaning to make an end-of-year gift to ALTA, now is the time.

Plus: All donations up to $20,000 will be matched!

Support literary translators in 2026: Give to ALTA by the end of the day today! buff.ly/KbZ9vTF

MFA Students Travel to Tucson for ALTA48 | Literary Translation On a sunny November day in Tucson, Arizona, forty translators gathered around two poems written in Icelandic, a language that few if any of them had studied. Led by Icelandic translator and editor…

“ALTA is different because you are welcome everywhere."

Val Galitskiy, a graduate student in Boston University’s MFA in Literary Translation program, reflects on the ALTA48 conference held in November of this year. At Boston University: buff.ly/sPOCCHj

Our winter open reading period for literary translations and new plays runs through Jan 12. We welcome volumes of poetry, collections of short fiction, and completed novels in translation and submissions of finished full-length plays (60-120 min. running time).
www.cmu.edu/universitypr...

Diana Arterian on Nadia Anjuman’s Life, Resistance, and Poetry As a teenager, desperate to learn literature, Nadia Anjuman secretly attended the Golden Needle School in her home city of Herat, Afghanistan. The women attendees hid books beneath their needlepoin…

“What makes Anjuman remarkable is her poetry—her ferocity and unfailing desire to continue to participate in this ancient art. How she enshrines her humanity with the poetic line.”

ALTA member Diana Arterian writes about co-translating Nadia Anjuman’s SMOKE DRIFTS. At Lit Hub:

Help us meet the challenges of 2026 & beyond (+ get a number of benefits when you do!). Help us keep finding solutions - after all, it's what translators do. We find solutions.

There are just a few days left: Make a (matched!) gift to ALTA & help us reach our $20,000 goal by Friday! buff.ly/KbZ9vTF

The Best Books in (and on) Translation We Read in 2025 - Words Without Borders 13 staff members, 11 countries, 9 languages: The WWB team recommends our favorite books in translation from 2025.

In search of a literary stocking stuffer? Check out this list of the year’s best books in (and on) translation, featuring ALTA members Kevin Gerry Dunn, Michelle Mirabella, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, and Jacqueline Leung. At WWB:

Five Poems from Served Waters - Latin American Literature Today The contours are dissolved by the palm.

“Much greater is the force that arises from the immense / and humble act of being alive,” writes Carlos Cociña, translated by Alec Schumacher. Read these stunning poems at Latin American Literature Today: buff.ly/U7a4cZx

This winter, when you make a gift to ALTA, you won't just get the satisfaction of knowing that you're supporting the organization that brings the only annual conference dedicated exclusively to the art of literary translation - you'll enjoy a great number of benefits when you do! buff.ly/3qi1aiA