11th Annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize Winners
We are pleased to announce the winner of our annual Chametzky Translation Prize is Yuemin He for her translation of Zhang Zhihao's “A Life Unexperienced Before” from its original Chinese. Published in our Summer 2024 issue, her translation of this piece can be read here.
To celebrate the 11th anniversary of this prize, our judges included two honorable mentions as well: Wiam El-Tamami's translation of Batool Abu Akleen's “All Roads Lead to the Sky,” (MR Vol. 65, Issue 4) and Iraj Omidvar and Parviz Omidvar’s translation of “Sometimes Only . . .” by Zia Movahed (MR Vol. 65, Issue 2).
An interview with Yuemin He and a virtual reading with all three winners will be held later this Spring.
Biographies:
DR. YUEMIN HE is a writer, translator, and editor based in Virginia. She has published on East Asian literature and visual art, Asian American literature, Buddhist American literature, and composition pedagogy. Her writings appear in The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature (CUNY), Religion and the Arts, and Teaching Asian North American Texts (MLA 2022). Her poetry translations have been anthologized in Oxford Anthology of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (2nd ed.) or have appeared in more than twenty literary magazines and journals, including Metamorphoses, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and Silk Road Review. Currently, she is an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College and serves as an editor for The Northern Virginia Review.
ZHANG ZHIHAO [张执浩] was born in Jingmen, Hubei, province in 1965. One of the most renowned contemporary Chinese poets, he is author of ten poetry collections along with several books of fiction and essay collections. Zhang has won almost all the prestigious poetry awards in China, including the annual Chen Zi’ang Poetry Award and the Luxun Literary Prize for poetry (Chinese equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize). Currently, he is editor-in-chief of Chinese Poetry, a quarterly poetry magazine in Wuhan, China.
WIAM EL-TAMAMI is an Egyptian writer, translator, editor, and wanderer. She has spent the last twenty years moving between different cultures and communities across the Middle East, Europe, Southeast Asia, and North America. Her writing and translation work has been featured in Granta, Ploughshares, Freeman’s, AGNI, CRAFT, ArabLit, Social Movement Studies, The Sun Magazine, Jadaliyya, and Banipal, as well as several anthologies. She won the 2011 Harvill Secker Translation Prize, was a finalist for the 2023 Disquiet International Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2023 CRAFT Nonfiction Award and the 2024 First Pages Prize. Her work has also received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2024. She is currently based in Berlin.
BATOOL ABU AKLEEN is a Palestinian poet from Gaza. She received the Barjeel Poetry Prize in 2020. Her poems have been translated into several languages, including English and Italian, and published in various literary magazines and anthologies.
IRAJ OMIDVAR teaches at Kennesaw State University in the Atlanta area. In collaboration with his father, Parviz, he translated two anthologies of modern Iranian poetry into English. Many of the poems have been published in literary journals such as Poetry Review, New Letters, International Poetry Review, and Poetry International. One set of translations has appeared in a public work in Slough, United Kingdom. He was a Fulbright Fellow in Tunisia in 2007. Among his scholarly publications are Historic Engagements with Occidental Cultures, Religions, Powers(Palgrave), and Muslims and American Popular Culture (Praeger).
Before moving to the United States in the 1990s, PARVIZ OMIDVAR was a published translator into Persian of English books on topics such as folk tales and labor movements. In collaboration with his son, Iraj, he translated two anthologies of modern Iranian poetry into English. Many of the translations have been published in literary journals such as Poetry Review, New Letters, International Poetry Review, and Poetry International. One set of translations has appeared in a public work in Slough, United Kingdom.
ZIA MOVAHED is an eminent poet, philosopher, and scholar in Iran. For most of the period after the turbulent 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, he has lived in Iran and has undertaken his scholarly and artistic work under difficult conditions there. Throughout, he has been a strong voice for tolerance and dialogue.