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The PEN Translation Fund Announces its 2009 Grant Recipients

The PEN Translation Fund, now in its sixth year, is pleased to announce the
winners of its 2009 competition. Out of a field of precisely 100
applicants, the Fund’s Advisory Board has selected the eleven projects
listed below for funding.

In this time of fiscal crisis, the Fund very gratefully acknowledges the
generous support of Amazon.com, which now assists the Fund’s work with an
annual gift of $10,000 and provides free publicity to all Fund-supported
books:

Eric Abrahamsen for My Spiritual Homeland by Wang Xiaobo (1952-1997), a
collection of penetrating, funny and breathtakingly frank essays written
fifteen years after the Cultural Revolution by one of China’s most
insightful and controversial writers. (No publisher)

Mee Chang for Garden of Youth (1981) by Oh Junghee, a series of powerful
stories that center on the struggles of domestic life during the Korean
War, by a writer widely recognized as the master of the Korean short
story. (No publisher)

Robyn Creswell for The Clash of Images (1995) by Abdelfattah Kilito, a
hybrid bildungsroman, written in French, set in the medina of an unnamed
Moroccan city. Growing up in a traditional world where the image is taboo,
the protagonist is seduced by new American technologies of the image. (No
publisher)

Brett Foster for Elemental Rebel: The Rime of Cecco Angiolieri
(1260-1310?), a selection of impudent sonnets by a Sienese rival of Dante
with a penchant for parodic wordplay. (Forthcoming from Princeton
University Press)

Geoffrey Michael Goshgarian for The Remnants by Hagop Oshagan (1883-1948),
a historical novel widely considered one of the greatest masterpieces of
Armenian literature, written in the early 1930s `to save what remained of our
people.’ (No publisher)

Tess Lewis for That Didn’t Reassure the Children (2006) by Alois Hotschnig,
a collection of disquieting stories about the mystery, fluidity and perils
of intimacy, by a prize-winning Austrian writer renowned for his stylistic
virtuosity. (No publisher)

Fayre Makeig for Mourning (2006), a selection of free verse poems by H.E.
Sayeh, an eminent contemporary Iranian poet whose life and work span many of
Iran’s political, cultural and literary upheavals. `Tell us, heaven, why
the rain / pours from your eyes…’ (No publisher)

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra for Poems of Kabir, a selection of 60 Hindi padas
(songs) by India’s legendary mystic poet saint (1398?-1448?) who opposed all
religious and social orthodoxies and oppositions. `But I’m wasting my time,
/ Says Kabir, / Even death’s bludgeon / About to crush your head / Won’t
wake you up.’ (No publisher)

Frederika Randall for Deliver Us from Evil by Luigi Meneghello (1922-2007),
a darkly original memoir, ordered by theme rather than chronology, set in
rural Italy when the Church and Il Duce ruled. The savage immediacy of
childhood perception combines with amused and astutely ironic insights in an
unsentimental human comedy. (No publisher)

Daniel Shapiro for Missing Persons, Animals and Artists (1999) by Roberto
Ransom, a short story collection by an acclaimed young Mexican writer which
explores the enigmas of art and the creative process with gentle irony and
whimsical, at times fantastical, premises. (No publisher)

Chantal Wright for A Handful of Water (2008), poems written in German by
Tzveta Sofronieva, a young Bulgarian-born poet, trained as a physicist and
science historian, who also writes in Bulgarian and English. Joseph Brodsky
said of her, `Listen carefully… She has something to say. (No publisher)

The voting members of this year’s Advisory Board were Sara Bershtel, Edwin
Frank, Michael Henry Heim, Michael Moore, Richard Sieburth and Jeffrey Yang.
Esther Allen guided the Board’s deliberations ex oficio.

For more information about the PEN Translation fund, and a list of projects
funded in previous years, several of which are still in search of
publishers, please visit or

Editors interested in learning more about any Translation Fund
grant-winning project may contact Esther Allen (
esther.allen@centerforliterarytranslation.org) or Nick Burd (nick@pen.org)
for further information.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress