John Dryden
BCLA
John Dryden Translation Competition 2020 - 2021
CLOSING DATE FOR RECEIPT OF ENTRIES: 8 February 2021
Download John Dryden Competition Entry form
The British Comparative Literature Association and the British Centre for Literary Translation are pleased to announce their continued joint sponsorship of the translation competition for 2020-2021. Prizes will be awarded for the best unpublished literary translations from any language into English, subject to finding a reader (entrance fee will be refunded if no reader is available). Literary translation includes poetry, prose, or drama from any period. The competition is currently hosted by the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds.
First prize: £350; second prize: £200; third prize: £100; other entries may receive commendations.
All three prizes also include one year’s BCLA membership.
Judges will be selected from the following:
Dr Jacob Blakesley (Chair) (Academic Fellow in World Literatures and Translation Studies, University of Leeds)
Professor Susan Bassnett (Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Glasgow/Warwick)Dr Emily Finer (Senior Lecturer in Russian and Comparative Literature, University of St Andrews)
Dr Stuart Gillespie (Reader, University of Glasgow and Founding Editor, Translation and Literature)
Professor Maike Oergel (Professor of German and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham)
Professor Wen-chin Ouyang (Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature, SOAS)
Professor Martin Sorrell (Professor of Modern Languages, University of Exeter)
Robert Chandler (Translator)
The judges will be assisted by expert bilingual readers specialising in the literatures for which entries are received.
Prize-winners will be announced in summer/autumn 2021 on the BCLA website:
Subject to copyright, winning entries will be published in full in Comparative Critical Studies and on the Edinburgh University Press website
If you join the BCLA between 1 July 2020 and 31 January 2021, you may submit one entry free of charge. Please note this on your John Dryden Competition Entry form.
The entry fee is £10 sterling for one, £15 for two, or £20 for three entries. Payment can be made via the University of Leeds secure online store: https://store.leeds.ac.uk/.
Electronic entries (source text, translation, entry form) should be emailed to: R.Hibbitt@leeds.ac.uk
If you need to send hard copies, please send them to the following address:
Dr Richard Hibbitt, John Dryden Translation Competition
School of Languages, Cultures & Societies
University of Leeds
Leeds
LS2 9JT
United Kingdom
Entries will be received from September 2020
Failure to comply with the competition rules (printed overleaf) will render entries ineligible.
Download John Dryden Competition Entry form
The British Comparative Literature Association organises a translation competition in memory of the first British poet laureate John Dryden (1631–1700), who was a literary critic, translator, and playwright as well as a poet. Sponsored jointly with the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, the John Dryden Translation Competition awards prizes for unpublished literary translations from any language into English. Literary translation includes poetry, prose, or drama from any period.
Image Credit: Department of English, University of Sheffield.
Winners of the 2019 John Dryden Translation Competition
The British Comparative Literature Association would like to announce the winners of the 2019-20 BCLA/BCLT John Dryden Translation Competition, chosen from over 100 entries and 29 different languages.
Many thanks to everyone who entered the competition.
First Place:
Kate Roy for Extracts from Zanzibar Blues, or: How I Found Livingstone from Hans Christoph Buch’s German text Sansibar Blues oder Wie ich Livingstone fand
Second Place:
Fintan O’Higgins for Battle of the Mice and Frogs from the Ancient Greek text Batrachomyomachia
Third Place:
Natascha Bruce for Dark as a Boy from Ho Sok Fong’s Chinese text 像男孩一樣黑
Highly Commended:
Deirdre McMahon for Owls fly soundlessly from Carolina Schutti’s German text Eulen fliegen lautlos
The shortlist also included:
Jo Heinrich for The Wolf’s Path from Sylvain Tesson’s French text L’Axe du Loup: De la Sibérie à L’Inde sur les pas des évadés du goulag;
Aubrey Botsford for Ten More Minutes to Buffalo: A Play in One Act from Günter Grass’s German text Noch zehn Minuten bis Buffalo;
Julieta Caldas for The Outside and the Inside from Nicolas Bouvier’s French text Le Dehors et le dedans;
Rituparna Sengupta for Amrita Pritam—Seven Poems from Amrita Pritam’s Punjabi text Chuni Hui Kavitaayein; and
Kseniia Vitalievna Bogdanova for The Tale of Prideful Aggeus from Vsevolod Garshin’s Russian text Сказание о гордом Аггее.
The Longlist included (in alphabetical order):
Abigail Dyer for Lohengrin, Act II (from Richard Wagner’s German)
Allana Noyes for Animal Memory (from Claudia Morales’s Spanish)
Aubrey Botsford for Battle Ashes and After the Silence (from Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Italian)
Bethany Hine for Yardbird By Night; The Land of Water (from Yanick Lahens’ French)
Bob Knowles for The English in Egypt (from José Maria de Eça de Queiroz’s Portuguese)
Brian Welsh for The Sunday Afternoon Car (from Renate Dorrestein’s Dutch)
Chona Mendoza for The Cedar of Lebanon (from Grazia Deledda’s Italian)
Darcy Hurford for Siberia – a self-portrait with wings (from Ulla-Lena Lundberg’s Swedish)
Ekaterina Petrova for Remora or The Full Stop at the End (from Iana Boukova’s Bulgarian)
Elizaveta Timofeeva for The Black Man (from Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin’s Russian)
Heli Pärna for Comrade child (from Leelo Tungal’s Estonian)
Jonny Elling for Fresco Sonnets to Christian S. (from Heinrich Heine’s German)
Jozef van der Voort for PHON (from Marente de Moor’s Dutch)
Laura Shanahan for A Man Without Character (from Elsa Morante’s Italian)
Lucia Buccheri for The Taste Tester (from Giuseppina Torregrossa’s Italian)
Marielle Sutherland for The House with the Corridor (from Undine Gruenter’s German)
Rachel Farmer for How Many Trains (from Lena Kugler’s German)
Rosie Arscott for Fluids (from Alice Moine’s French)
Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell for To the Beach (from Peter Højrup’s Danish)
Thierry Kehou for Three Little Shoeshiners (from Francis Bebey’s French)
