We are delighted to announce our third annual New Translator’s Bursary.
The New Translator’s Bursary is an annual award aiming to promote literary fiction in translation as well as the work of emerging literary translators. The two previous recipients of the bursary are Anam Zafar and Freya Tong.
This year, the bursary will focus on the languages and cultures of sub-Saharan Africa. African literature is extraordinarily rich and diverse, however only a very small fraction of it is translated into English. While entries are open to short stories from any language, we particularly welcome submissions from underrepresented languages and by translators (including L2 translators) from underrepresented communities.
Submissions are welcome from new and emerging translators who have yet to publish a book-length translation, or have yet been contracted to translate a manuscript for publication.
Submissions are welcome from translators wishing to translate a short story by a writer from sub-Saharan Africa. 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 in previous years 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. The application form also asks you to provide biographical details about the author and about yourself, and to give us your reasons for wishing to translate this particular author/story.
Submissions will be read by our Translator in Residence, Frank Wynne and by this year’s guest judge, the acclaimed translator Ros Schwartz. The selected story will be published and Frank Wynne will work with the bursary recipient to guide the text towards publication. The chosen story will be published by The Stinging Fly, either in our magazine or online as part of our monthly fiction series.
This year’s bursary is €1200. This includes the fee payable for publishing the translation. Where necessary, we will clear the underlying rights for the story and cover any payment owed to the original author or their publisher or agent.
All submissions must be received before midnight – Irish time – on Friday 3 November. We are accepting applications via Submittable.
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Ros Schwartz is an award-winning translator from French. Acclaimed for her new version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (published in 2010), she has over 100 fiction and nonfiction titles to her name. One of the team retranslating George Simenon’s novels for Penguin Classics. She has translated a number of Francophone writers including Tahar ben Jelloun, Fatou Diome and Ousmane Sembène and most recently Max Lobe’s A Long Way from Douala (HopeRoad) and Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? (HopeRoad). She is a judge for the 2023 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize.
Frank Wynne is an Irish literary translator from French and Spanish whose authors have included Michel Houellebecq, Javier Cercas and Virginie Despentes. He has twice jointly won the Dublin Literary Award (in 2002, and again in 2023 for his translation of Alice Zeniter’s The Art of Losing). HIs work has twice earned him 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 was chair of the jury for the 2022 International Booker Prize.