2013 Award Winners Announced!

Ninth Letter is proud to announce the winners of our 2013 Literary Awards!

Poetry winner: R. A. Villanueva, for his poems "Aftermaths" and "Sacrum"

Fiction winner: Caitlin O'Neill, for her story "The Change Over Day"

Creative Nonfiction winner: Jessica Wilbanks, for her essay "On the Far Side of the Fire"

Literature in Translation: Eleanor Goodman, for her translation of excerpts from Shen Wei's A Dictionary of Xinjiang

Other honors accorded by our judges include:

G. C. Waldrep selected "Three Expressions of El Tio" and "Five Characteristics of the Genus Tragelaphus" by Zoey Farber as the Runner Up entry in poetry

Alexis Levitin selected Olga Nikolova's translations of "A Birthday Between Two Seas," "A Formula for Infinity," and "Toast" by Krasimira Zafirova's as the Runner Up entry up in translation

Margot Livesey named "Pinprick" by Christie Heinrichs, "Charcoal" by Rachel Unkefer, and "Here Where the World Is Greening" by Rachel May as Honorable Mentions in fiction.

Many thanks to our judges G. C. Waldrep, Lia Purpura, Alexis Levitin, and Margot Livesey, and to all the terrific authors who submitted work.

Announcement: Submission Dates

Our regular submission period will end this Thursday, February 28, at 5pm. New electronic submissions will not be accepted after that time. All mailed submissions, if you're into that, must be postmarked by that date. Check out our submission guidelines for a last minute refresher.

However, we will begin accepting submissions for our first ever Literary Awards on March 1! We have four categories: Fiction, Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Literature in Translation. The winner of each category wins $1,000 as well as publication in our Fall/Winter 2013-14 (vol. 10, no. 2) issue. Details on entry fees, judges, and submission information can be found on our contest page.

We look forward to reading your work! 

Big News: 2013 Literary Awards

We are very happy to announce our first annual Literary Awards competition! We'll begin accepting entries in March, so get to work on putting your submission together. There will be four categories: Fiction, Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Literature in Translation. The winner for each category will receive $1,000 and publication in our Fall/Winter 2013-14 issue (vol. 10, no. 2).

The entry fee is $17 for one submission to one category. All entrants receive a one-year subscription to Ninth Letter. For more information on the contest, including who will be judging each category (hint: they're incredible) and formatting, etc., vist the contest page. 

Of course, we'll have more information as the contest entry period draws closer. 

Contributor Book News

Sherman Alexie's collection, War Dances, has been named a finalist for the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The winner will be announced on March 23. Alexie is featured in Ninth Letter's current issue.

Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi (vol. 1, no. 1) has been nominated for LA Times Best Book Award for her book Apocalyptic Swing.

Kathleen Rooney published two books recently. The first is a collection of essays, For You, For You I am Trilling these Songs, featuring "Natural's Not In It," which first appeared in vol. 4, no. 2 of Ninth Letter. The other is a collaboration with Elisa Gabbert called Don't ever stay the same; keep changing.

Ghosts by Cesar Aira (translated from Spanish by Chris Andrews) has been shortlisted for the 2009 Best Translated Book Award. An excerpt from Ghosts appeared in Ninth Letter's vol. 5, no. 2 issue.

NEA Fellowships for Literary Translations

The National Endowment for the Arts recently awarded fellowships to 16 literary translators. We are very happy to report that Brian Henry is one of these recipients. Brian Henry's translation of a poem by Ales Steger will appear in our next issue (vol. 6, no. 2). The grant is to support his translation of Steger's essay collection, Berlin, from Slovenian.

Congratulations!

New Books: GHOSTS by César Aira

Ghosts, by César Aira, newly translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, is now available from New Directions Publishing. The New York Times calls Aira "one of the most provocative and idio­syncratic novelists working in Spanish today."

An excerpt from Ghosts appears in the latest issue of Ninth Letter, vol. 5 #2.

Literary Translation: A View from the Pacific

The University of Illinois's new Center for Translation Studies is hosting their first Translation Colloquium on Monday October 27th, at 4:00 in the Lucy Ellis Lounge of the Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews, Urbana.

Jean Anderson, Director of the New Zealand Center for Literary Translation, and Senior Lecturer in the Department of French at Victoria University of Wellington, will be giving a lecture entitled “Literary Translation: A View from the Pacific.” She herself is a translator of francophone texts of the Pacific (Tahiti, New Caledonia) and works to get New Zealand writers translated into French.

Ninth Letter on Portuguese TV!

Check out the Camara Clara archives--they did a segment on Philip Graham's reports to the US from Lisbon and highlighted his video postcards published on this blog via YouTube. The segment aired last week on June 10, so go to the Camara Clara site and select "Arquivos," then choose "10 de Junho de 2007." Philip comes in just before the 11th minute mark. It's mostly in Portuguese, but you can get the gist of it...

Cool! International TV stars!

NEA International Literature Awards

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded three $10,000 grants to literary presses for the support of literary works in translations. The honored presses are Archipelago Books, Etruscan Press, and the newly-Champaign-based Dalkey Archive Press.

Quoth NEA Chair Dana Gioia: "Translation provides Americans with as direct a connection as possible to both the individual voice of the author and the heart of a culture." Ninth Letter agrees. Good on the NEA for supporting these fine presses in their efforts to promote international literature to American audiences.