The Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures reports with great enthusiasm that Hajar Hussaini has won the second cycle of the Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature for her translations of Maral Taheri’s verse. Hussaini and Taheri will be awarded $10,000 and $5,000 respectively while the selection of Taheri’s work will be published by Deep Vellum in 2026. We congratulate both of them on this recognition and wish them continued success. The judges describe why Taheri’s poetry finds such a compelling home in Hussaini’s English translations:
the poetry of Maral Taheri is provocative and disquieting—in the very best of ways. It inspires surrender, then kaleidoscopically enthralls. There is an undeniable urgency to Taheri’s poetic voice, her truths, and the way she tells them, with uncanny juxtapositions of love, sex, scripture, war, and other kinds of violence. Her translator, Hajar Hussaini, describes her work—unpublishable both in Iran and Afghanistan—as raw, ‘defiantly feminine’, and piercingly intelligent. Hussaini’s remarkable translations echo these qualities. They also betray a deep kinship with their poet, an intimate, almost intrinsic, familiarity with her experience and expression. In Hussaini’s agile renderings, Taheri’s verses cascade down the page, each one building upon, breaking down, and bounding off the last. The rhythm continues to reverberate long after you stop reading. The effect is nothing short of tremendous.
MELC received forty varied and exciting submissions from around the world, all focused on Persian poetry. This is twice as many as the number of proposals we received for the inaugural cycle last year which shows the steady growth of this prize. The Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures thanks the Mo Habib Memorial Foundation for making this initiative possible and to the judges who carefully read and discussed the submissions.
The judges have identified two projects that merit honorable mention: Ashkaan Kashani’s proposal to translate Nima Yushij and Dr. Jane Mikkelson’s selection of 17th century lyric poetry. They write,
Iran’s first modernist poet, Nima Yushij, is still an elusive figure in today’s international reception of Persian literature. With his linguistically rigorous yet creatively subversive approach to translation, Ashkaan Kashani promises to revive Nima’s experimental rhythms and imagery in exciting new forms in a project poised to revolutionize our understanding of the lyric aesthetics that dominated 20th-century Iran. Kashani’s renditions go far, in the most musically convincing of ways, while submitting to the ineffable beauty of Nima’s innovations and sensitively piercing the original texts with care and attention.
Dr. Jane Mikkelson’s translations of 17th-century Persian lyric poetry are a paragon of elegance and precision. Her perfectly chiseled renditions in English verse reveal the Translator’s profound knowledge of this little-studied and often misunderstood literary corpus. Without flattening the philosophical complexity and stylistic intricacy of the original texts, Jane Mikkelson makes them legible to contemporary readers in surprisingly enchanting ways.
In recognizing the outstanding value of their translations, the judges encourage Kashani and Mikkelson to continue working on their brilliant projects. We look forward to working with Ms. Hussaini and Deep Vellum to ensure a bilingual selection of Maral Taheri’s poetry will soon be in the hands of English-language readers and listeners in print and audio book formats. The third cycle of the Mo Habib Translation Prize will be announced in September.
The Mo Habib Memorial Foundation celebrates the life and legacy of Mohammad Habib by supporting education, culture, and the arts in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Born in Tehran in 1952, he moved to the U.S. in 1970 to attend college, eventually obtaining his BS and MS in Engineering and Construction Management from the University of Washington. For forty years, he worked as a project manager and structural engineer. Mohammad is survived by his wife, Superior Court Judge Susan Amini, and his son, Cyrus Habib, who served as the state’s 16th Lieutenant Governor prior to leaving public life to become a Jesuit.
Founded in 2013 in Dallas, Texas, Deep Vellum's mission is to bring the world into conversation through literature. In its first five years, Deep Vellum published 90 works in translation by international writers (see here) and hosted dozens of literary events for Dallas residents.
-Artwork by Amelia Ossorio, MELC student majoring in Persian