The Polish Book Institute, the Polish Cultural Institute London (PCI London), and the Polish Cultural Institute New York (PCI New York) are delighted to announce that Mira Rosenthal has been awarded the 2025 Found in Translation Award, for her translation of To the Letter („Litery”), which was published last year by Archipelago Books.

The last few years have seen an extraordinary selection of outstanding Polish books available in English. The longlist of submitted works this year included Polish classics and contemporary literature, poetry and prose, translations of the highest literary quality, from which it was a real challenge to choose the best.

“It is always exciting to watch how a translator gradually penetrates a poet’s work. Mira Rosenthal is an experienced translator of Tomasz Różycki’s work. Thanks to her loyal and beautiful translation of To the Letter, she has managed to achieve an enviable goal, both enabling readers to get to know the poet’s voice, while at the same time creating a work that has gained an independent voice in English,” says Anna Zaranko, winner of the Found in Translation Award 2023 and one of the jurors of the Found in Translation Award 2025 edition, speaking about this year’s award-winning collection.

Alissa Valles, last year’s winner of the Found in Translation Award for her translation of Zuzanna Ginczanka’s Firebird and a juror of FiTA 2025, adds: “In her extraordinary translation, Mira Rosenthal enters the rich world of Tomasz Różycki’s poems and tackles the considerable formal challenges with deep dedication, intelligence, and grace. The poet is very lucky to have found such a translator, and English-speaking readers are very lucky to have gained access to a contemporary poetic project of such stature and beauty.”

The collection To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki is yet another recent success of Polish poetry in the demanding English-language market, which is immensely gratifying, as it not only builds its brand but also bodes well for the future interest of English-speaking publishers and readers in the work of contemporary Polish poets.

Tomasz Różycki is one of the most distinctive poetic voices in the Polish language in the 21st century. In his work, the poet references classical authors and high modernism. He is the author of several books, mainly poetry, such as the poems Twelve Stations (2004) and Ijasz (2021), as well as poetry collections Colonies (2005), Letters (2016), and The Beekeeper’s Hand (2022). Two years ago, his novel The Lightbulb Thieves was honored with the prestigious European literary award Grand Continent 2023.

About the book

Tomasz Różycki’s To the Letter follows Lieutenant Anielewicz on the hunt for any clues that might lead 21st century human beings out of a sense of despair. With authoritarianism rising across Eastern Europe, the Lieutenant longs for a secret hero. At first, he suspects some hidden mechanism afoot: fruit tutors him in the ways of color, he drifts out to sea to study the grammar of tides, or he gazes at the sun as it thrums away like a timepiece. In one poem, he admits “this is the story of my confusion,” and in the next the Lieutenant is back on the trail. “This lunacy needs a full investigation,” he jibes. He wants to get to the bottom of it all, but he’s often bewitched by letters and the trickery of language. Diacritics on Polish words form a “flock of sooty flecks, clinging to letters” and Lieutenant Anielewicz studies the tails, accents, and strokes that twist this script. While the Lieutenant can’t write a coherent code to solve life’s mysteries or to fill the absence of a country rent by war, his search for patterns throughout art, philosophy, and literature lead not to despair but to an affirmation of the importance of human love. Różycki collects moments of illumination – a cat dashing out of a window and “feral sun” streaking in, a body planting itself in the ground like rhubarb and flowering. He collects and collects, opens a crack, and clutches a shrapnel of epiphany. 

About the translator

Mira Rosenthal grew up in California. She is the author of the collection Territorial, which was a finalist for the INDIES Book of the Year award, and the collection The Local World, which was honored with the Wick Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and residencies at Hedgebrook and MacDowell. She teaches creative writing at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Among her translations of Polish poetry are Tideline by Krystyna Dąbrowska and Colonies by Tomasz Różycki, which won the Northern California Book Award and were nominated for several other honors, including the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Rosenthal regularly publishes in respected journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, The New York Review of Books, Harvard Review, PN Review, Threepenny Review, A Public Space, and Oxford American. She served for five years on the board of the American Literary Translators Association.

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About FiTA

The award was established in 2008. It is given every year to an author/author of the best translation of Polish literature into English that was published in book form in the previous calendar year. The award is a one-month residency stay in Kraków, Poland with a monthly stipend of 2,000 PLN, a flight to and from Kraków and a prize of 16,000 PLN.

The award is given by a jury consisting of representatives of The Polish Book Institute Warsaw / Kraków, The Polish Cultural Institute London, and The Polish Cultural Institute New York, as well as translators, the winners of its two previous editions.