National Translation Award

Each year, the ALTA National Translation Award honors a translator whose work, by virtue of both its quality and significance, has made an extraordinary contribution to literary translation during the preceding year. The award carries a $2,500 stipend. Each year, more than 100 translations from at least two dozen languages are entered for consideration. (Details on submitting books for this award can be found here.)

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Pulitzer-winning poet and translator Richard Wilbur was honored with the prestigious 2008 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association during the group’s annual conference on Thursday, Oct. 16, in Minneapolis.

Each year, the National Translation Award honors the translator whose work, by virtue of both its quality and significance, has made the most valuable contribution to literary translation during the previous year. The award was conferred on Richard Wilbur for his translation of French dramatist Pierre Corneille’s The Theatre of Illusion.

Richard Wilbur is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his books of poetry New and Collected Poems (1988) and Things of This World (1956). He is the former president and chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has won the National Book Award, the PEN Translation Prize and two Bollingen Prizes. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1987 to 1988. A Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets, Wilbur currently lives in Cummington, Mass.

For information about previous winners, click here.