With the aim of elevating awareness and engendering appreciation of Spanish literature in the United States, this triennial $10,000 prize has been created by the Cultural Committee and Board of Directors of Queen Sofía Spanish Institute to honor the best English-language translation of a work of fiction written in Castilian by a Spanish author and published by an American imprint. The inaugural award, celebrating the best translation published between 2006 and 2008, was given in 2010 to Edith Grossman for her 2008 translation of Antonio Muñoz Molina's A Manuscript of Ashes. Subsequent awards are anticipated in 2012 and 2015.

Prizes

2006 – 2008 (Inaugural Prize, awarded February 2010):
Dr. Edith Grossman – A Manuscript of Ashes by Antonio Muñoz Molina

2009 – 2011 (to be awarded in 2012): Currently accepting submissions.

2012 Reading Committee

Dr. Edith Grossman, winner of the Inaugural Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize, is a distinguished translator and critic of contemporary Latin American and Spanish writers, among them Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes. Her recent honors include the 2006 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation. Dr. Grossman’s 2003 translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote is considered by such critics as Harold Bloom to be the best English translation to date, and her 2010 volume Why Translation Matters (Yale University Press) was received with glowing praise by the New York Times Book Review.

Esther Allen is the author of an International PEN report on Translation and Globalization. Allen's translations include The Selected Writings of José Martí, Lands of Memory by Felisberto Hernández, Dark Back of Time by Javier Marías, The Tale of the Rose by Consuelo de Saint Exupèry, Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution, and, most recently, The Nubian Prince by Juan Bonilla. Allen is the co-director of PEN World Voices and an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages & Comparative Literature at Baruch College. She has recently been awarded a 2009-2010 Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library (NYPL). Her project, which she has already begun, is the English translation of the Spanish book ‘Borges’ by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Margaret Carson’s recent translations include the 19th-century gaucho play Juan Moreira and 20th-century works of the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera, and the Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro.

Alternate

Isaías Lerner, Distinguished Professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literature at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and member of the Institute’s Cultural and Fine Arts Committee, heads the reading committee for the prize. His book Arcaísmos léxicos del español de América won the Augusto Malaret Prize of the Real Academia Española. He is the recipient of many fellowships, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.