The Stinging Fly is thrilled to announce its second annual New Translator’s Bursary.
Our inaugural bursary attracted many excellent submissions, and we were proud to publish the winner, Anam Zafar, whose translation of Four Stories by Najat Abed Alsamad offered shattering insights into everyday experiences of the war in Syria.
This year, the bursary will focus on the languages of Asia, which, despite the extraordinary work of Tilted Axis Press and others, have for too long been underrepresented in anglophone publishing.
Submissions are welcome from new and emerging translators who have not yet published a book in translation. We are looking for submissions from translators wishing to translate a short story into English from any Asian language. The story must be by a living author – ideally one whose work has not yet been widely published in English. We particularly welcome stories from underrepresented voices and cultures. Translators who submitted stories for the bursary last year are welcome to do so again. As a guideline, the story should ideally run to no more than 4,000 to 5,000 words.
In the first instance, please submit the author’s name, the full original text of the story, together with a sample translation of no more than 500 words, biographical details about yourself and about the author, and your reasons for wishing to translate this particular author/story.
The Translator in Residence, Frank Wynne, will select the story to be published and work with the bursary recipient to guide the text towards publication. The chosen story will be published here on our website as part of our monthly fiction series.
The bursary on offer is €1,000. This amount includes the fee payable for publishing the translation on stingingfly.org. Where necessary, we will help clear the underlying rights for the story and cover any payment owed to the original author or publisher.
All submissions must be received before midnight – Irish time – on Friday 4 November. We are accepting applications via Submittable.
Frank Wynne is an Irish literary translator from French and Spanish whose authors have included Michel Houellebecq, Javier Cercas and Virginie Despentes. He jointly won the Dublin Literary Award, and has twice won both the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán. He edited the anthologies Found in Translation (2018) and QUEER: LGBT writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday (2021). In 2022, he jointly won the Dublin Literary Award with the author Alice Zeniter for his translation of her novel The Art of Losing. He was chair of the jury for the 2022 International Booker Prize.