The Best Literary Translations 2024
Best Literary Translations is a new, annual anthology that celebrates world literatures in English translation and honors the translators who create and literary journals that publish this work.
Best Literary Translations 2024 features both contemporary and historical poetry and prose originally written in nineteen languages—including some not commonly seen in U.S. translations, such as Burmese, Kurdish, Tigrinya, and Wayuu—brought into English by thirty-eight of the most talented translators working today. These poems, short stories, essays, and hybrid pieces were drawn from nominated works published in U.S. literary journals during 2023 that spanned more than eighty countries and nearly sixty languages. The four series coeditors, Noh Anothai, Wendy Call, Öykü Tekten, and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, selected the finalists from over five hundred nominations.
By spotlighting work from top literary journals, Best Literary Translations honors the excellent literature created every year by a diverse range of authors and translators and will continue to expand the canon of global literatures in English translation, showcasing the bold and brilliant work of contemporary translators and editors annually, for years to come.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten much honored collections of poetry, including The Asking: New and Selected Poems (2023), two now-classic essay collections, and four volumes presenting and co-translating world poets from the deep past, including The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Komachi and Shikibu; Mirabi: Ecstatic Poems; Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women; and The Heart of Haiku. Her own work has in turn been translated into seventeen languages. A former chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, she is an elected member of The American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Noh Anothai’s translations range from classical Siamese poets to contemporary Thai authors, including several recipients of the Southeast Asian Writers (SEAWrite) Award. He has taught Creative Writing in both the American Midwest and Thailand’s Far North and lectured at the Siam Society Under Royal Patronage and Chulalongkorn University’s Center for Translation Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Track for International Writers, at Washington University in St. Louis in 2023.
Wendy Call is co-editor of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide, author of No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy, and translator of three books of poems. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia and Translator in Residence at the University of Iowa, as well as a fellow of Cornell University’s Institute of Comparative Modernities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wendy teaches creative nonfiction in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program and makes her home in Seattle, on Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca, on Zapotec and Mixtec land.
Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, editor, and archivist living between Granada and New York. She is also a founding member of Pinsapo, NY-based collective and press with a particular focus on work in and about translation, as well as a contributing editor and archivist with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. She is the translator of Selected Poems by Betül Dünder (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023) and the co-translator of Separated from the Sun by İlhan Sami Çomak (Smokestack Books, 2022).
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is the publisher of OlongoAfrica.com. A Nigerian writer and linguist, he has authored two poetry collections, Edwardsville by Heart (2018) and Ìgbà Èwe (2021), and a multimedia dictionary of names. He is a Fulbright Scholar (2009) and a Chevening Research Fellow at the British Library in London (2019/2020). His work in language advocacy earned him the Premio Ostana Special Prize in 2016. His work has appeared in The Moth, Absinthe World Literature in Translation, International Literary Quarterly, Sentinel Poetry, Isele Magazine, Brittle Paper, Aké Review, Linguapax Review, The Guardian (UK), PEN Transmissions, etc. He can be found at www.kolatubosun.com
