The American Academy of Arts & Letters Presents the 2024 Wilder Prize for Translation
The Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation is a biennial award presented by The American Academy of Arts & Letters. Since 2009, it has honored a practitioner, scholar, or patron who has made a significant contribution to the art of literary translation.
Two remarkable individuals –Charlotte Mandell and Michael F. Moore - will receive this prize at The Academy’s Annual Ceremonial on May 22, 2024. In addition to the Wilder Prize, during the ceremony the Academy will induct twenty-three new members and present awards in architecture, visual art, literature and music. Doris Kearns Goodwin will receive the Gold Medal for Biography and Laurie Anderson will receive the Gold Medal for Music. James C. Horton will be recognized with the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts, and Harvard University professor Danielle Allen will deliver the keynote Blashfield Address.
Thornton Wilder was elected a member of the Academy in 1928 and he received the Gold Medal for Fiction in 1952.
Previous winners of the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation include Linda Asher, Jamey Gambrell, Edith Grossman, David Hinton, Michael Hofman, Gregory Rabassa and Red Pine.
Photo Credit Tim Davis
CHARLOTTE MANDELL has translated over fifty books of fiction, poetry, and philosophy from the French, including works by Flaubert, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Abdelwahab Meddeb. Her translation of Blanchot’s Faux Pas was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature for 2001-2002 by the Modern Language Association. Her translation of Zone by Mathias Énard was a recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. Her co-translation with Lauren Elkin of Jean Cocteau by Claude Arnaud was a recipient of the 2017 French-American Foundation Translation Prize. Her translation of Compass by Mathias Énard was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017 and was the recipient of the 2018 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. In April 2021 she received the honour of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government. Her forthcoming translations are Proust’s In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom; Valéry’s complete Monsieur Teste; Céline’s War; Jonathan Littell’s book on the war in Ukraine, An Inconvenient Place; and Mathias Énard’s latest novel, Deserter.
Photo courtesy of Michael F. Moore
MICHAEL F. MOORE’s translations range across genres, from modern classics to contemporary fiction and non-fiction, including: The Drowned and the Saved, by Primo Levi; Agostino, by Alberto Moravia; Quiet Chaos, by Sandro Veronesi; and Live Bait, by Fabio Genovesi. His translation of The Betrothed, by Alessandri Manzoni, received a translation prize from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Italian Prose in Translation Award of the American Literary Translators Association. He has recently completed a translation of Spatriati, by Mario Desiati, which will appear later this year.
For many years Michael served as the chair of the PEN Translation Committee and, subsequently, as the Chair of the Advisory Board of the PEN/Heim Translation Grant. He was also the staff interpreter and translator of the Italian Mission to the United Nations.
Recognition of his work includes an NEA Translation Grant, the first translator-in-residence at Princeton University, and a fellowship at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy.
He received his Ph.D in Italian studies from New York University, with a thesis on Petrarch commentaries in the fifteenth century.
Moore teaches literary translation in the MFA program at the School of the Arts of Columbia University.