On November 1, 2018, the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced the winners of its National Translation Awards, which celebrate “literary translators who have made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality.” This year’s winners are Third-Millennium Heart by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, translated from the Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, which received the award in poetry, and Compass by Mathias Énard, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, which received the award in prose.

ALTA has been conducting their annual awards for twenty years, though 2018 is only the fourth year in which poetry and prose received separate prizes. These are the only national awards for translated works that “includes a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work,” as ALTA notes on its site. The poetry judges this year were Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Jennifer Feeley, and Sawako Nakayasu, while the prose judges were Esther Allen, Tess Lewis, and Jeremy Tiang.

Submissions are welcome during the first four months of each year for translated works published in the previous year.