The Africa Institute is pleased to announce the recipients of its inaugural Global Africa Translation Fellowship launched as part of its African Languages and Translation Program. Grants in the range of $1,000 to $5,000 are offered annually to support the completion of translations of original works from the African continent and its diaspora, into Arabic and/or English. Selected works may be retranslations of old, classic texts, or previously untranslated works, collections of poetry, novel, prose, or critical theory. The project may be a work-in-progress, or a new project feasible for completion within the timeframe of the grant.
The awardees for the 2021 the Global Africa Translation Fellowship are:
Reem Abou-El-Fadl, for translation and editing of the Arabic-language memoir of Egyptian intellectual and activist Helmi Sharawy, Sira Misriyya Ifriqiya (An Egyptian African Story), which was first published in 2019 by independent Cairo press Dar Al-Ain.
Adil Babikir, for the translation of Sudanese author Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin’s book Samahani from Arabic into English.
Claretta Holsey, for the translation of four scholarly essays from René Ménil’s Tracées: Identité, Négritude, Esthétique aux Antilles from French into English.
David Shook, for the translation of Francisco José Tenreiro’s collected poems from Portuguese into English, including his seminal 1942 debut Ilha de Nome Santo (Island with a Holy Name).
To learn more about the Global Africa Translation Fellowship Program and the application process, visit here.
Reem Abou-El-Fadl is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East at SOAS University of London. Her work explores the politics of nationalism, protest, and transnational solidarity in Middle East and Afro-Asian spaces. Her book, Foreign Policy as Nation Making: Turkey and Egypt in the Cold War was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. She is the editor of Revolutionary Egypt: Connecting Domestic and International Struggles (Routledge, 2015), and co-editor of the Jadaliyya Egypt page. She translates from Arabic and Turkish frequently in her research.
Adil Babikir is a Sudanese translator and copywriter based in the UAE. His published translations include Mansi: a Rare Man in his Own Way by Tayeb Salih (Banipal Books, 2020); Modern Sudanese Poetry: an Anthology (University of Nebraska Press, 2019); The Jungo: Stakes of the Earth, a novel by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin (Africa World Press, USA, 2015); Literary Sudans: an Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan, (Red Sea Press, USA, 2016); Summer Maze, a collection of short stories by Leila Aboulela, translated to Arabic (Dar al-Musawarrat, Khartoum, 2017). Babikir is a contributing editor of Banipal Magazine. Some of his translations appeared in Banipal, The Guardian, Al-Doha magazine, and Jalada Africa. His forthcoming works include a collection of Sudanese short novels and a book on the legendary Bedouin poet al-Hardallo.
Claretta Holsey has received a Jane Mead Fellowship for her poetry thesis and a Global Africa Translation Fellowship from the Africa Institute in Sharjah. Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in New Delta Review, The Columbia Review, Eclectica Magazine, PromptPress, on poets.org, and elsewhere. A book of her ekphrastic poems—inspired by the artwork of Malcolm Corley and written in collaboration with fellow poets Jorrell Watkins, DJ Savarese, and Lateef McLeod—will be published by PromptPress in fall 2021. Also in the fall, she will pursue an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. A recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is a Production Editor at Copper Canyon Press.
David Shook is a poet and translator as well as the founding editor of Phoneme Media, now an imprint of Deep Vellum Publishing. They have translated over 15 books, including Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon, Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s Room in Rome, a finalist for both the National Translation Award and PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation, and Conceição Lima’s forthcoming selected poems, for which they received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. Shook has edited special features on literature from Burundi and Equatorial Guinea, for Words Without Borders and World Literature Today respectively, translated Obi’s Nightmare, the first ever graphic novel from Equatorial Guinea, and published the first-ever literary translation from the Lingala, Richard Ali A Mutu’s Mr. Fix-It. Current translation projects include the poetry and fiction of Cabo Verdean experimentalist President Jorge Carlos Fonseca.
The Africa Institute is pleased to announce the recipients of its inaugural Global Africa Translation Fellowship launched as part of its African Languages and Translation Program. Grants in the range of $1,000 to $5,000 are offered annually to support the completion of translations of original works from the African continent and its diaspora, into Arabic and/or English. Selected works may be retranslations of old, classic texts, or previously untranslated works, collections of poetry, novel, prose, or critical theory. The project may be a work-in-progress, or a new project feasible for completion within the timeframe of the grant.
The Africa Institute is pleased to announce the recipients of its inaugural Global Africa Translation Fellowship launched as part of its African Languages and Translation Program. Grants in the range of $1,000 to $5,000 are offered annually to support the completion of translations of original works from the African continent and its diaspora, into Arabic and/or English. Selected works may be retranslations of old, classic texts, or previously untranslated works, collections of poetry, novel, prose, or critical theory. The project may be a work-in-progress, or a new project feasible for completion within the timeframe of the grant.
The awardees for the 2021 the Global Africa Translation Fellowship are:
Reem Abou-El-Fadl, for translation and editing of the Arabic-language memoir of Egyptian intellectual and activist Helmi Sharawy, Sira Misriyya Ifriqiya (An Egyptian African Story), which was first published in 2019 by independent Cairo press Dar Al-Ain.
Adil Babikir, for the translation of Sudanese author Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin’s book Samahani from Arabic into English.
Claretta Holsey, for the translation of four scholarly essays from René Ménil’s Tracées: Identité, Négritude, Esthétique aux Antilles from French into English.
David Shook, for the translation of Francisco José Tenreiro’s collected poems from Portuguese into English, including his seminal 1942 debut Ilha de Nome Santo (Island with a Holy Name).
To learn more about the Global Africa Translation Fellowship Program and the application process, visit here.
Reem Abou-El-Fadl is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East at SOAS University of London. Her work explores the politics of nationalism, protest, and transnational solidarity in Middle East and Afro-Asian spaces. Her book, Foreign Policy as Nation Making: Turkey and Egypt in the Cold War was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. She is the editor of Revolutionary Egypt: Connecting Domestic and International Struggles (Routledge, 2015), and co-editor of the Jadaliyya Egypt page. She translates from Arabic and Turkish frequently in her research.
Adil Babikir is a Sudanese translator and copywriter based in the UAE. His published translations include Mansi: a Rare Man in his Own Way by Tayeb Salih (Banipal Books, 2020); Modern Sudanese Poetry: an Anthology (University of Nebraska Press, 2019); The Jungo: Stakes of the Earth, a novel by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin (Africa World Press, USA, 2015); Literary Sudans: an Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan, (Red Sea Press, USA, 2016); Summer Maze, a collection of short stories by Leila Aboulela, translated to Arabic (Dar al-Musawarrat, Khartoum, 2017). Babikir is a contributing editor of Banipal Magazine. Some of his translations appeared in Banipal, The Guardian, Al-Doha magazine, and Jalada Africa. His forthcoming works include a collection of Sudanese short novels and a book on the legendary Bedouin poet al-Hardallo.
Claretta Holsey has received a Jane Mead Fellowship for her poetry thesis and a Global Africa Translation Fellowship from the Africa Institute in Sharjah. Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in New Delta Review, The Columbia Review, Eclectica Magazine, PromptPress, on poets.org, and elsewhere. A book of her ekphrastic poems—inspired by the artwork of Malcolm Corley and written in collaboration with fellow poets Jorrell Watkins, DJ Savarese, and Lateef McLeod—will be published by PromptPress in fall 2021. Also in the fall, she will pursue an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. A recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is a Production Editor at Copper Canyon Press.
David Shook is a poet and translator as well as the founding editor of Phoneme Media, now an imprint of Deep Vellum Publishing. They have translated over 15 books, including Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon, Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s Room in Rome, a finalist for both the National Translation Award and PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation, and Conceição Lima’s forthcoming selected poems, for which they received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. Shook has edited special features on literature from Burundi and Equatorial Guinea, for Words Without Borders and World Literature Today respectively, translated Obi’s Nightmare, the first ever graphic novel from Equatorial Guinea, and published the first-ever literary translation from the Lingala, Richard Ali A Mutu’s Mr. Fix-It. Current translation projects include the poetry and fiction of Cabo Verdean experimentalist President Jorge Carlos Fonseca.
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