Announcing the Winners of the 2026 Chametzky Prize
Congratulations to Amanda Sarasien and Elton Uliana, winners of our annual Chametzky Prize for their translation of José Luís Peixoto’s “The Woman Who Dreamed”! This story appeared in our Summer 2025 issue, and was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
You can read their joint 10 Questions interview from last year here.
We will be conducting a more extensive interview with the translators in the months to come—stay tuned!
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We would also like to present Elisabeth Jaquette, translator of Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq’s “Scenes from Behind the Siege” from our Winter 2025 issue, with an Honorable Mention for the prize.
Photo credit: Tona Ambrosetti
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A huge congratulations to all three translators for such excellent work in the field: MR is so grateful for the work you all do, and for sharing it with and through us!
AMANDA SARASIEN is a writer and translator working from Portuguese and French into English. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, her work has appeared in The Common, West Branch, Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is past co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee and lives in Chicago.
ELTON ULIANA is a Brazilian writer, literary critic and translator based in London. He is the co-editor of the Brazilian Translation Club at University College London (UCL). His work has been featured in the Oxford Anthology of Translation, Latin American Literature Today, Art in Translation, Asymptote, Tablet, Alchemy Journal of Translation, West Branch, Your Impossible Voice, as well as in the anthologies Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women (Harper Collins, 2023) and Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction: A Bilingual Anthology (UCL Press, 2024).
ELISABETH JAQUETTE is a translator from Arabic and executive director of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Minor Detail by Palestinian author Adania Shibli was a finalist for the National Book Awards and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Other translations include Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun, The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz, and The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous. Formerly, she was executive director of the American Literary Translators Association.
