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Celebrating our 10th Annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize Winner and Honorable Mentions!

We are pleased to announce the winner of our annual Chametzky Translation Prize is Mike Day for his translation of Lu Min's "Song of Parting" from its original Chinese. Published in our Fall 2020 issue, Day's translation of this moving story of a village can be read here.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this prize, our judges included two honorable mentions as well: Bruna Dantas Lobato's translation of Caio Fernando Abreu's "Beyond the Point" (MR Vol. 60, Issue 1) and Mara Faye Lethem's translation of three stories by Pere Calders (MR Vol. 59, Issue 3).

An interview with Michael Day and a virtual reading with all three winners will be held later this Spring.

Biographies:

MICHAEL DAY is a traveler, writer, and translator from Chinese and Japanese. He splits his time between California and Latin America. His work has previously appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, China Channel, Words Without Borders, Chicago Quarterly Review, Structo, and the anthology That We May Live from Two Lines Press, among other publications. He won the 2015 Bai Meigui Award for Chinese to English literary translation.

LU MIN's best-known works include Dinner for Six and This Love Could Not Be Delivered. She has received the People's Literature Award, the Chinese Writers Award, the Biennial Chinese Literary Award, the Zhuang Zhong Wen Literary Award, the Xiao Shuo Xuan Kan Readers' Choice Award, the Fiction Monthly Hundred Flowers Award, and the 2007 Young Chinese Writers Award. In 2009, she won China's foremost literary award, the Lu Xun Literary Prize. Her novel This Love Could Not Be Delivered has been published in English translation by Simon & Schuster, and her short stories have been translated into German, French, Japanese, Russian, English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and Korean. She lives in Beijing.

BRUNA DANTAS LOBATO was born and raised in Natal, Brazil. A graduate of Bennington College, she received her MFA in fiction from New York University and is currently an Iowa Arts Fellow and MFA candidate in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. Her stories, essays, and translations from the Portuguese have appeared in Harvard Review, Ploughshares online, BOMB, The Common, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Public Space Fellow. maria joo medeiros is a writer, scriptwriter, and translator. She coauthored The Regicide Dossier and wrote Portuguese Oracles of the Twentieth Century. She translated Daniel Defoe’s The Political History of the Devil and Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. She also republished an 1877 Portuguese gothic novel, Henriqueta —A Hero of the XIX Century, and is currently developing a documentary on the subject.

CAIO FERNANDO ABREU was one of the most influential and original Brazilian writers of short fiction of the 1980s and ’90s, and the author of twelve story collections set in and published during the military dictatorship and at the height of the AIDS epidemic in Brazil. He has been awarded major literary prizes, including the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Fiction three times. He died of AIDS in Porto Alegre in 1996, at forty-seven.

MARA FAYE LETHEM is a writer and translator whose work has been featured in Granta, Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, The Guardian, and El País, among others. Her translation of Patricio Pron’s Don’t Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets is forthcoming from Knopf.

PERE CALDERS(1912–1994) is one of the most beloved and widely read Catalan writers of the twentieth century. Also an editor, journalist, and cartoonist, he is best known for his short stories. The three featured in this issue are from the collection Chronicles of the Hidden Truth, written during his twenty-three-year exile in Mexico, and first published in 1955.


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