The Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature at the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures has forged an exciting partnership with the American Literary Translators Associations (ALTA) to fund a year-long fellowship for literary translators who translate from Persian into English. ALTA is a non-profit, membership-based association for literary translators in North America.
For the past eight years, ALTA has been running the highly coveted “Emerging Translators Programs,” one of which is tailored specifically to help early career translators develop their craft and professional networks. The process works as follows: ALTA will make an open call for applications in September, following a rigorous selection process, successful applicants are paired with experienced translators with whom they work closely for a year. The program culminates in the annual ALTA conference in autumn where translators and their mentors will present excerpts from their projects. The Mo Habib Prize will fund the mentor and mentee’s travel stipends as well as an honorarium for the mentor.
The program’s alumni have produced a truly impressive body of work, around thirty book-length works published by such acclaimed publishers as the Penguin Classics, Zephyr Press, Deep Vellum, and New York Review Books. You can learn about their accomplishments here. ALTA mentorships have been supported by a wide variety of institutional partners such as the BIPOC Literary Translators Caucus, the Institut Ramon Llull, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, the Polish Cultural Institute New York, the SALT Project, the Swedish Arts Council, the Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, Québec Édition, and the Yanai Initiative.
One of the strengths of the program is its sheer linguistic diversity, having worked with languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Bangla, Nepali, Panjabi, Japanese, Catalan, Urdu, Swedish, and two dozen others. This will be the first time a translator working from Persian will enter their cohort! It is our hope that initiatives like this will lead to increasing diversification in the types of literary translation from Persian, which are heavily area studies oriented. The Mo Habib Prize was established in 2021 in order to expand and diversify the readership of Persian literature from its own diverse cultural geographies. Dr. Michelle Quay won the inaugural cycle for translating a novel by Reza Ghassemi, an Iranian fiction writer based in Paris, and Hajar Hussaini won the second cycle for translating the poetry of Maral Taheri, an Afghan poet currently residing in France.
ALTA’s applications will be open September 1 - November 30, 2024 and the program will begin in February 2025. Please look out for the call for applications on ALTA’s website and its social media accounts.
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.
-Artwork by Amelia Ossorio, MELC student