The Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, established in 2009, is awarded by the American Academy of Arts & Letters to a practitioner, scholar or patron who has made a significant contribution to the art of literary translation. It was established by Tappan Wilder and Catharine Wilder Guiles, the nephew and niece of Academy member Thornton Wilder (1897–1975), and given for the first time in 2009. [1]
Year | Translator | Ref. |
---|---|---|
2009 | Gregory Rabassa | [2] [3] |
2012 | Michael Hofmann | [4] [3] |
2014 | David Hinton | [5] [3] |
2016 | Jamey Gambrell | [6] [3] |
2018 | Bill Porter (Red Pine) | [3] [7] |
2020 | Linda Asher | [3] |
2022 | Edith Grossman | [8] |
2024 | Charlotte Mandell | [9] |
Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of the 1999 film of the same name, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
Richard Purdy Wilbur was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, often employing rhyme, and composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989.
The Abel Prize is awarded annually by the King of Norway to one or more outstanding mathematicians. It is named after the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829) and directly modeled after the Nobel Prizes; as such, it is widely considered the Nobel Prize of Math. It comes with a monetary award of 7.5 million Norwegian kroner.
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Henri Cole is an American poet, who has published many collections of poetry and a memoir. His books have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Arabic.
Lorrie Moore is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She is best known for her short stories, some of which have won major awards. Since 1984, she has also taught creative writing.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headquarters is in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It shares Audubon Terrace, a Beaux Arts/American Renaissance complex on Broadway between West 155th and 156th Streets, with the Hispanic Society of America and Boricua College.
Daniel Gerard Hoffman was an American poet, essayist, and academic. He was appointed the twenty-second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1973.
The Academy of American Poets is a national, member-supported organization that promotes poets and the art of poetry. The nonprofit organization was incorporated in the state of New York in 1934. It fosters the readership of poetry through outreach activities such as National Poetry Month, its website Poets.org, the syndicated series Poem-a-Day, American Poets magazine, readings and events, and poetry resources for K-12 educators. In addition, it sponsors a portfolio of nine major poetry awards, of which the first was a fellowship created in 1946 to support a poet and honor "distinguished achievement," and more than 200 prizes for student poets.
Edith Marion Grossman was an American literary translator. Known for her work translating Latin American and Spanish literature to English, she translated the works of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos, Álvaro Mutis, and Miguel de Cervantes. She was a recipient of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and the 2022 Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation.
J. D. "Sandy" McClatchy was an American poet, opera librettist and literary critic. He was editor of the Yale Review and president of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Bill Porter is an American author who translates under the pen-name Red Pine. He is a translator of Chinese texts, primarily Taoist and Buddhist, including poetry and sūtras. In 2018, he won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Thornton Wilder Prize for translation.
Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes short short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann's Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
John R. Keene Jr. is an American writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His 2022 poetry collection, Punks: New and Selected Poems, received the National Book Award for Poetry.
Two American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medals are awarded each year by the academy for distinguished achievement. The two awards are taken in rotation from these categories:
Nina C. Young is an American electro-acoustic composer of contemporary classical music who resides in New York City. She won the 2015 Rome Prize in musical composition, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 Charles Ives Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Timothy M. Frye is an American political scientist. He is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, and the author of several books about Russia and Eurasia.
Christopher Trapani is an American/Italian composer of contemporary classical music. In 2007 he won the Gaudeamus Award of the Dutch Gaudeamus Foundation. A CD of his music, Waterlines, was released in 2018. A second release of Waterlines by the Ictus Ensemble was named one of the top 5 classical releases of 2020 by De Standaard. In 2021–2022 he was a visiting assistant professor at the Thornton School of Music of the University of Southern California.
Anna Frajlich, known also as Anna Frajlich-Zając, is a Polish-American poet and a Senior Lecturer Emerita at the Department of Slavic Languages and Associate Faculty Member, Harriman Institute at Columbia University in New York City, where she taught Polish language and literature for over three decades.