2014 Best Translated Book Award . . . The Beginning

Although the announcement of the 2013 Best Translated Book Award winners is only a couple of months old, it’s already time to start thinking about next year’s award.

First up—announcing the fiction jury and the deadline for fiction submissions. Easy bit first: As with years previous, to submit a title for the award, you, the publisher/author/translator simply have to send a copy to each of the nine judges (and myself for record keeping) by November 30th, 2013.

Although most judges prefer hard copies, if you’d rather send a PDF, mobi, or ePub file, that’s perfectly acceptable, and the emails for all of the judges are contained in the PDF below.

All books published between January 1, 2013 and December 31, 2013 are eligible.¹

I’ll have information about the dates for announcing the longlist, shortlist, and winners in the not too distant future, but for now, if you’re a publisher/author/translator, you should start flooding the doorsteps of these judges.

The nine judges for the 2014 BTBA for Fiction are:

George Carroll, West Coast sales rep and soccer editor for Shelf Awareness;

Monica Carter, author, former bookseller, and editor of Salonica;

Scott Esposito, marketing director at the Center for the Art of Translation, and editor of Conversational Reading and Quarterly Conversation;

Sarah Gerard, bookseller at McNally Jackson;

Elizabeth Harris translator from the Italian and associate professor at the University of North Dakota;

Daniel Medin, associate professor at the American University of Paris, co-editor of the Cahiers Series, and Quarterly Conversation
and the White Review;

Michael Orthofer, of the Complete Review and Literary Saloon;

Stephen Sparks, bookseller at Green Apple Books; and

Jenn Witte, bookseller at Skylight Books.

Really excited about this year’s jury. And we’re making some changes to the process this year. A lot of behind the scenes things, but a couple things that will be made visible to the general public. I’ll update you on these as soon as I get back from Brazil.

For now though, start sending along all eligible titles. Here’s a small label sheet with everyone’s address, and here’s a bigger one with physical and email addresses.

¹ Worth noting that every book published in translation and distributed in the U.S. in 2013 can be selected by the jury regardless of whether or not that book was mailed to all of the judges. Obviously, the odds of a book being selected for the longlist are increased exponentially if the judges don’t have to try and hunt down a copy . . .