In This Story
At a festive ceremony this evening, Villa Albertine announced the two winners of the first Albertine Translation Prize. Honoring the best contemporary French literature in English translation, the 2022 award went to Isabelle Sorente’s La femme et l’oiseau (JC Lattes), translated by Heather Green (seeking American publisher) and Mohamad Amer Meziane’s Des empires sous la terre : Histoire écologique et raciale de la sécularisation (La découverte), translated by Jonathan Adjemian (Verso Books).
The Albertine Translation Fund & Prizes was launched this year as a new and enhanced version of the prestigious French Voices Awards. Recognizing the quality of both the original work and the translation, a committee of independent professional experts (academics, translators, and publishers) selects winners that epitomize the many facets of a vibrant French literary scene.
In total, the Albertine Translation committee selected 22 works for 2022 that reflect the diversity and richness of French publishing, including fiction, essays, poetry, comics, and children’s books. Each will receive grants from the Albertine Translation Fund, providing $2,000 for publication costs and covering half of the cost of translation, up to $5,000. See the full selection here.
Among the selected grantees, the committee chooses two titles to name prize winners, one in fiction and one in non-fiction. Both The Woman and the Falcon and Empires Beneath the Earth are based on exceptional original texts, were translated with uncommon mastery, and contain subject matter that would have a particularly strong resonance in the American literary landscape.
About The Winners
Note: English titles are provisional, pending publication.
La femme et l’oiseau / The Woman and the Falcon by Isabelle Sorente, translated by Heather Green (JC Lattes / seeking American publisher)
When Vina is expelled from high school for threatening a classmate, her mother Elisabeth takes refuge with her at her great-uncle’s house in Alsace. Soon, Vina is fascinated by this man, who communicates with birds and seems to read people’s thoughts. Thomas acquired these gifts during the war, when he was captured, at seventeen, and forced into the malgré-nous (or “despite ourselves”), a group of soldiers from Eastern France who were forcibly conscripted into the German Wehrmacht. Though haunted by his time in the war, and in Tambov, a Russian prison camp, Thomas forges a bond with Vina through their shared, intense connection with the natural world.
Isabelle Sorente is the author of nine novels, three essay collections, and two plays. She writes as a columnist for France Inter and Philosophie Magazine. Sorente has worked, over two decades and across genres, in a philosophical mode, exploring cruelty in the forms of animal farming, the persecution of witches, and racism, to name a few, and the ways we, as humans, might move away from violence and toward compassion, freedom, and even joy. Surprisingly, none of Sorente’s books have yet appeared in English.
Heather Green is the author of No Other Rome (2021) and the translator of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won (2018). Her poetry and translations have appeared in AGNI, Asymptote, the New Yorker, and Ploughshares. Green currently serves as a reviewer for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books, a jury member for the NBCC’s Barrios Prize for a book in translation, and an Assistant Professor at George Mason University.