‘Greater conversations about what poetry can be in Australia and the wider world’: New translated poetry prize launched 

Giramondo Publishing, a small independent Australian publishing house, has partnered with London-based Fitzcarraldo Editions and New York City–based New Directions to launch the Poetry in Translation Prize, following the success of the three publishers’ Novel Prize, which began in 2020. 

The Poetry in Translation Prize is a biennial award for an outstanding poetry collection translated into English. The winning entry will receive an advance of $5000, to be shared equally between poet and translator, and simultaneous publication in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, North America, and the UK and Ireland.

To contextualise this development, Books+Publishing (B+P) outlines a slice of the current poetry landscape in Australia, speaking with Nick Tapper of Giramondo Publishing.

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The earnings of Australian writers is critically below minimum wage (currently $49,296), and financial prospects for poets are known to be at the lower end, at approximately $5,700 per annum, according to Creative Australia’s 2022 research.

Those of us in the industry know that, despite this lack of monetary compensation, the power of poetry can be immeasurable. After all, how can you measure the impact of sparse words and lines shaped on a page or spoken to an audience? How can quantitative data show poetry’s power to hold and teach emotion, to share and draw experience, to connect across a country and across the seas?

Before the pandemic introduced a ‘new normal’, Giramondo Publishing shared a stand at Frankfurt with literary publishers from the US, Italy, Argentina, Spain, Finland, China and more – ‘a sign of how independents from around the world often work with a shared ethos,’ says Giramondo associate publisher Nick Tapper.

When asked about the contextual factors that led to the establishment of the inaugural Poetry in Translation Prize, Tapper leans towards this sense of something shared (but perhaps not as often recognised as such): ‘Though poetry in its outlook is often very cosmopolitan, in its reception it is often treated as quite a localised phenomenon; poets are rarely invited to writers’ festivals or given opportunities for international exposure.’ (more…)

Originally published by Books and Publishing (Read More)