The mentees selected for the prestigious Emerging Literary Translator Mentorships Programme 2021 were announced by the National Centre for Writing (NCW) at an event held on International Translation Day, 30 September 2021. Every year the programme supports the development of a new cohort of literary translators into English, particularly for languages whose literature is currently under-represented in English translation.

Now in its eleventh year, the scheme was founded by writer, editor and translator Daniel Hahn and is organised by the NCW. It has so far supported 97 translators in more than 30 languages.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has selected Jess Jensen Mitchell as her mentee this year. Jess is a translator based in the USA, hoping to work on Jerzy Pilch’s 1993 tragicomic work of autofiction List of Adulteresses: Travel Prose (Spis cudzołożnic. Proza podróżna).

The other winners of the 2021-2022 Emerging Literary Translator Mentorships Programme are:

· Ieva Lakute – Latvian (mentored by Kaija Straumanis)

· Lise Lærdal Bryn – Norwegian (mentored by Kari Dickson)

· Amaryllis Gacioppo – Italian (mentored by Howard Curtis)

· Yuki Tejima –Japanese (mentored by Juliet Winters Carpenter)

· Shanna Tan – Korean (mentored by Anton Hur)

· Irina Sadovina – Russian (mentored by Oliver Ready)

· Astrid Freuler – Swiss German (mentored by Jamie Lee Searle)

This year’s cohort also includes three mentorships specifically aimed at encouraging literary translators currently underrepresented in the industry. Two Visible Communities mentorships – designed to support one UK-based Black or Brown literary translator, and one UK-based literary translator from the diaspora, heritage, or community languages of the UK – are awarded to:

· Salma Harland – Arabic (mentored by Sawad Hussain)

· Csilla Toldy – Hungarian (mentored by Meena Kandasamy).

The British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) and British Council mentorship, which supports a literary translator currently resident in a country on the OECD list of countries qualifying for Official Development Assistance, is awarded to:

· Hanna Leliv – Ukranian (mentored by Canan Marasligil)

Two runners up, Umesh Kumar and Quyen Nguyen-Hoang, will also receive digital mentoring sessions with award-winning French translator Ros Schwartz.

Each mentee will be matched up with an experienced translator for a six-month period during which they work together on practical translation projects, developing their craft through working on a chosen text or texts.

The winners will go on to join alumni such as Sophie Hughes, whose translations of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder and Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season were shortlisted for the 2019 and the 2020 International Booker Prize.

The Emerging Translator Mentorships Programme is supported by: Arts Council England, The Literary Translation Institute of Korea, The Polish Cultural Institute, The Royal Norwegian Embassy, The Russian Institute for Literary Translation, The Italian Cultural Institute, Pro-Helvetia, the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities at UCLA and Waseda University, Latvian Literature, the British Centre for Literary Translation and the British Council.

www.nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk