American Literary Translators Association
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American Literary Translators Association
@littranslate.bsky.social
The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) promotes literary translation through advocacy, education and services to literary translators.

https://literarytranslators.org/
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In May, like many in the literary arts community, ALTA lost future funding from the NEA, as our conference and programming “no longer effectuate[d] agency priorities.”

Donate to ALTA today, and help us reach our goal of raising $20,000 by December 19.

We can only do it together!
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.”…
alta.app.neoncrm.com
⏰ 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
December 19, 2025 at 3:30 PM
“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
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…
www.bu.edu
December 19, 2025 at 3:06 PM
Reposted by American Literary Translators Association
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...
Submission Guidelines - Carnegie Mellon University Press - Carnegie Mellon University
Submission Guidelines
www.cmu.edu
December 16, 2025 at 7:33 PM
“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:
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…
lithub.com
December 18, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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
December 17, 2025 at 3:30 PM
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:
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.
wordswithoutborders.org
December 17, 2025 at 3:02 PM
“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
Five Poems from Served Waters - Latin American Literature Today
The contours are dissolved by the palm.
latinamericanliteraturetoday.org
December 16, 2025 at 3:01 PM
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
December 15, 2025 at 3:30 PM
“My mother didn’t kick or scream when I picked her up by the collar and threw her into the box. She was already too small to fight back.”

Read these strange and surreal poems by Rena Fukazawa, translated by Rina Kikuchi, Jen Crawford, and Melinda Smith. At WWB: buff.ly/AOGIPiB
The Sound of the Ants Popping: Two Poems - Words Without Borders
In Rena Fukazawa’s poems, children and mothers take on surreal shapes, becoming monsters to each other.
wordswithoutborders.org
December 15, 2025 at 3:02 PM
The annual recap of translated literature is here. John Self created a Top-5 list of the best translated fiction of 2025 to round out the year. Check it out at @us.theguardian.com:
Five of the best translated fiction of 2025
The return of Nobel laureate Han Kang; film-making under the Nazis; stuck in a time loop; Scandinavian thrills; and essential stories from postwar Iraq
www.theguardian.com
December 12, 2025 at 3:04 PM
Reposted by American Literary Translators Association
Submissions are open for the WLT Student Translation Prize. If you’re a student enrolled in a translation studies program, send your prose and poems in by 1/10/26. We want to read your translations! All the details are here in the link:
worldliteraturetoday.org/translation-...
December 11, 2025 at 8:01 PM
Enjoy this poem from DOCUMENT SHREDDING MUSEUM by Afrizal Malna, trans. Daniel Owen, pub. World Poetry Books - winner of the 2025 National Translation Award in Poetry!

Your donations now will help us continue celebrating excellence in literary translation. Make a gift today! buff.ly/3qi1aiA
December 11, 2025 at 3:30 PM
As the weather gets colder, curl up under a cozy blanket and check out these bone-chilling folk horror novels in translation. At @literaryhub.bsky.social:
Chilling Lit: Six Novels in Translation That Blend Folktales and Horror
Togetherness that’s on the side of suffocating, history that won’t stay put or past, and nature that doesn’t just exist, benignly, but watches and waits….Folk horror deals in dissonance, drea…
lithub.com
December 11, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by American Literary Translators Association
Translators are alchemists, conjuring meaning and beauty from one language into another. @littranslate.bsky.social’s sole purpose is to support and advocate for translators. If you can, help them help translators by making a donation. Maybe you’ll even win a virtual meeting with me . . .
December 10, 2025 at 5:59 PM
Did you know? When you donate $50 or more to ALTA by December 19, you'll be entered into a raffle to win a virtual meeting to talk shop with Buzz Poole of Sandorf Passage! @buzzpoole.bsky.social @sandorfpassage.bsky.social

Learn more here, and donate by December 19: buff.ly/9MCcuix
2025 Winter Fundraiser
Thanks to several generous ALTA members, we are excited to announce a full match for our winter fundraiser! That’s right: All donations up to our goal of $20,000 will be matched. We’re grateful to…
buff.ly
December 10, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Translator from German Ross Benjamin speaks with Krys Boyd, the host of KERA’s Think, about what we miss out on by allowing A.I. to translate for us. At @think.kera.org:
What we miss when an app translates for us - Think
Ross Benjamin joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why being less than fluent in a language affects how we pay attention and learn.
think.kera.org
December 10, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Thanks to several generous ALTA members, we are excited to announce a full match for our winter fundraiser!

That’s right: ✨All donations up to our goal of $20,000 will be matched.✨ We’re grateful to these members for this vote of confidence in the work ALTA does. 

Give here today! buff.ly/9MCcuix
December 9, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Congrats to 2025 ALTA mentee Rohee Dholakia for being nominated for the 2026 Hooghly Review Pushcart Prize for her translation of Panna Naik’s THE NEXT WEDNESDAY. See the full list of nominations on Instagram: www.instagram.com/p/DRhjBmKEtX...
December 9, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Did you know? When you donate $50 or more to ALTA by December 19, you'll be entered into a raffle to win a virtual feedback round on a short literary translation with award-winning translator Heather Cleary!

Learn more here, and donate by December 19: alta.app.neoncrm.com/campaigns/20...
December 8, 2025 at 3:30 PM
To recap the year, here’s a list of 100 notable books published by small presses in 2025, including ALTA member Oonagh Stransky’s translation of Domenico Starnone’s THE OLD MAN BY THE SEA. At @literaryhub.bsky.social:
100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025
The idea of 100 Notable Small Press Books was born November 2024, after The New York Times’s annual 100 Notable Books list featured eighty-two books from the Big Five publishing houses (Pengu…
lithub.com
December 8, 2025 at 3:01 PM
“Translation lives in that liminal space, in the slippage between the native and the foreign. It’s there that an openness occurs, a sovereign space that belongs to the translator..."

Shangyang Fang about STUDY OF SORROW, a collection of translated Song-dynasty Ci poems. At LARB: buff.ly/ArNzgLc
Phases of the Quotidian | Los Angeles Review of Books
C. Francis Fisher interviews Shangyang Fang about his new book “Study of Sorrow: Translations.”
lareviewofbooks.org
December 5, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Did you know? When you donate $25+ to ALTA by 12/19, you get entered into a raffle to win this year's National Translation Award winners, DOCUMENT SHREDDING MUSEUM, trans. Daniel Owen & SAND-CATCHER, trans. Barbara Romaine! Find out more about this and other giving benefits here:
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.”…
alta.app.neoncrm.com
December 4, 2025 at 3:30 PM
“There are these rarer, powerful moments where, through a quirk of phrasing or word order, you can feel language being actively patterned by a specific body.”

Kate Briggs talks about translating Hélène Bessette’s LILI IS CRYING. At BOMB Magazine: buff.ly/lXxHsqr @bombmag.bsky.social
BOMB Magazine | Kate Briggs by Tara Anne Dalbow
A newly translated 1953  roman poétique investigates the tenuous bonds between a mother and daughter.
bombmagazine.org
December 4, 2025 at 3:02 PM
“One language is not enough, and one place is not enough. What I do is close to juggling in a circus, in the most playful but also the most serious sense.”

Translators Yasmeen Hanoosh and Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy on language and untranslatability. At ArabLit: buff.ly/YWKX5iA @arablit.bsky.social
Wilding Language: Salim Barakat Between a Kurdish Heart and an Arabic Voice
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy discuss the idea of untranslatability (and perhaps, by extension, unreadability) and the work Salim B…
buff.ly
December 3, 2025 at 3:02 PM