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Mona Kareem Wins Spot in 2018 Emerging Translator Mentorships Programme

At the close of International Translation Day events in London on Monday, winners of the 2018 Emerging Translator Mentorships Programme were announced by Chris Gribble of Writers’ Centre Norwich:

Through the program, writers from eight countries, covering twelve languages, will receive mentoring, professional development, and financial assistance.

The program, founded by translation planet Daniel Hahn and organized by Writers’ Centre Norwich (WCN), aims to “develop successive new cohorts of literary translators into English, particularly for languages whose literature is currently under-represented in English translation.” According to a release, since the program started, 73 mentees have been supported in 32 languages, including — from the Arabic — Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp and Francisca McNeill.

Kareem, also a poet, recently translated a collection of Ashraf Fayadh’s poetry, Instructions Within.

The full list of winners:

Arabic – Mona Kareem (Brooklyn). Mentor: Paul Starkey.

Catalan – Iain Robinson (Barcelona). Mentor: Peter Bush.

Greek – Joshua Barley (Athens). Mentor: David Connolly.

Korean [funded by the Literary Translation Institute of Korea]  – Erica Chung (Brooklyn). Mentor: Deborah Smith.*

Latin American Spanish – Ellen Jones (London). Mentor: Samantha Schnee.

Latvian [funded by Latvian Literature] – Mārta Ziemelis (Toronto). Mentor: Daniel Hahn.

Lithuanian [funded by the Lithuanian Culture Institute] – Erika Lastovskyte (Oxford). Mentor: Shaun Whiteside.

Malayalam. Aswathy Senan (Delhi). Mentor: J Devika. **

Norwegian 1 [2 x funded by the Royal Norwegian Embassy] – Bruce Thomson (Norfolk). Mentor: Don Bartlett.

Norwegian 2 – Alison McCullough (Stavanger). Mentor: Kari Dickson.

Polish [funded by the Polish Cultural Institute] – Zosia Krasodomska-Jones (Cambridge). Mentor: Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Tamil –  Suchitra Ramachandran (Basel). Mentors: Subashree Krishnaswamy and Dilip Kumar.

The mentees will showcase their work at the London Book Fair in April 2018.

Hear Mona Kareem read in English and Arabic: