Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo and New Directions are pleased to announce the shortlist for the inaugural Poetry in Translation Prize, selected from 259 submissions in more than 55 languages.
The Poetry in Translation Prize is a biennial award for an outstanding poetry collection translated into English. The prize is open to living, published poets from around the world, writing in any language. The winning poet and translator will receive an advance of $5,000, to be shared equally between them, followed by simultaneous publication in North America with New Directions, in the UK and Ireland with Fitzcarraldo Editions, and in Australia and New Zealand with Giramondo. The winner will be announced in January 2026.
Poems from each shortlisted collection can be read at Granta online.
With the Remains of My Hands by Priya Bains, translated by Alex Mepham (Norwegian)
A Beam of Light in the Winter from the Bowstring Played by a Crested Serpent Eagle by Bukun Ismahasan Islituan, translated by Hugu Sutej (Bunun, Isbukun dialect)
The Dust Museum by Liu Ligan, translated by Dong Li (Chinese/Mainland)
Water’s Edge and Other Poems by Hiyori Kojima, translated by James Garza (Japanese)
Help Me Change My Bandages by Maniniwei, translated by Emily Lu (Chinese/Taiwan-Malaysia)
Just Land by Jaku Mata, translated by Eric Abalajon (Filipino)
The Past Is a Lonesome Town by Osdany Morales, translated by Harry Bauld (Spanish)
Life on Three Wheels by E.M. Palitha Edirisooriya, translated by Samodh Porawagamage and Kasun Pathirage (Sinhala)
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With the Remains of My Hands by Priya Bains, translated by Alex Mepham (Norwegian)
Through a flock of voices, a choir of close and distant relatives – parents, sons and daughters, uncles, aunts and grandparents – the eight poetic sequences in this collection give life to a large extended family, split between contemporary reality in Norway and a remembered life in Punjab. This collection is an embrace and a confrontation, full of sights, smells, colours, objects and stories. With the Remains of My Hands is written in a language both lived in yet distant, to mark the different ways a family reacts to the grief of migration.
Priya Bains is a poet, essayist and translator living in Oslo. She was educated at the Academy of Creative Writing in Hordaland (Skrivekunstakademiet), Bergen, and the Danish Academy of Creative Writing (Forfatterskolen), Copenhagen. She is the editor- in-chief at the journal Vinduet and was awarded the 2022 Olav H. Hauge Scholarship and the 2022 Bergen Literature Festival Scholarship. With the Remains of My Hands was nominated for the 2021 Tarjei Vesaas Debut Prize and in 2025 Priya Bains was named as one of the best Norwegian writers under 35 by Norsk Litteraturfestival and Morgenbladet.
Alex Mepham is a writer, translator and critic living in York, UK. Alex Mepham has been awarded a Northern Writers’ Award and has had poetry, translations and criticism appear in various journals including The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Stinging Fly, Prototype anthology, and Modern Poetry in Translation. Alex Mepham is an alumnus of the 2023–2024 Emerging Translators Mentorship with the National Centre for Writing.
A Beam of Light in the Winter from the Bowstring Played by a Crested Serpent Eagle by Bukun Ismahasan Islituan, translated by Hugu Sutej (Bunun, Isbukun dialect)
Bukun weaves personal and historical trauma around aspects of the cosmic in a voice both ancient and immediate, speaking for a people, yet retaining a deeply intimate ‘I’. The living relationship with the land is the anchor of this collection, which speaks to colonization, cultural erasure, ecological devastation and the enduring power of ancestral identity. Environmental entities, such as Mount Usaviah, are not just settings but characters and sources of identity. In a time of global environmental crisis, his connection to the land offers a vital and urgent perspective of resistance and resilience.
Bukun Ismahasan Islituan – an elder of the Bunun people – was born in the Namaxia district Kaohsiung of the Isbukun Bunun in Indigenous Taiwan. While participating in the first wave of Indigenous rights movements, he began exploring the collective memory of the Bunun people and writing poems in his endangered mother tongue: the Isbukun dialect of the Bunun language, spoken by about 20,000 people living in central and southern mountainous areas of Taiwan. His previous collections include Walking through the Moon in Time and Space, Moonlight of Formosan Sugar Palm and Bukun Bilingual Poetry: Where the Sun Revolves. In 2024 he won the Kaohsiung Literature & Art Award, and he has been chairman of the Indigenous Peoples Cultural Foundation and was a founding president of the Bunun Languages Association.
Hugu Sutej, from Tavokan of the Siraya people, is a veteran tribal mobilizer and organizer. He joined the ICCA Consortium in 2013 as the founding regional coordinator for East and North Asia until 2023 and is an active participant in the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. An elder himself, Sutej has been the chief advisor and co-founder of the Indigenous Taiwan Self-Determination Alliance since 2019, an organization that strives for inclusive nation-building based on recognizing the autonomy of all creatures.
The Dust Museum by Liu Ligan, translated by Dong Li (Chinese/Mainland)
The first section of The Dust Museum consists of narrative poems that elucidate the politics and personalities of people tangled up in precarious situations and inescapable histories, taking form from the ancient Chinese masters speaking through the voice and veil of pining courtesans. The second part of the book shows Liu’s experimentations with what exists ‘in the steam of this living’, as the ethereal and the earthy, the small and the spiritual, the meditative and the impassioned come together.
Liu Ligan is an acclaimed Chinese poet, novelist, critic and editor. He is the author of the poetry collections The Dust Museum and Flying Low, as well as the novel Every Morning, Every Evening. He was also a former key member of the influential literary group THEY. His works have been awarded numerous prizes, and have been translated into English, French and German, and have appeared recently in in 128 Lit, Asymptote, the Bombay Literary Magazine, Lana Turner and Modern Poetry in Translation.
Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French and German. A translator-in-residence at Princeton University for fall 2025, his full-length English translations from the Chinese include his PEN/Heim-winning The Gleaner Song by Song Lin, The Wild Great Wall by Zhu Zhu and his PEN/Heim-winning The Ruins by Ye Hui, which is forthcoming from Deep Vellum. His debut poetry collection, The Orange, was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and a finalist for Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize.
Water’s Edge and Other Poems by Hiyori Kojima, translated by James Garza (Japanese)
Through tightly controlled narrative poems, Kojima visits the site of the family as a source of pungent humour and potent mythology. Embracing the possibilities of the lyric mode as a way to practice a fictional address, these poems register the weight of the fictional in ‘reality’, and the role that the speculative plays in any utterances about the self, in poetry and in life. Kojima’s lines work in waves, with a cohesion produced in the spilling over of one into the next, the result of an artful use of syntax which allows for a flexible ordering of elements and ‘double-jointed’ lines which may or may not be enjambed. The mutability of these lines reinforces a thematic mutability: the unpredictability of bodies and the power of language to shape the self.
Hiyori Kojima was born in Tokyo in 1997 and raised in Fukuoka. In 2021, she won the 26th Nakahara Chūya Prize for her poetry collection Mizugiwa. She has published poems and essays in journals and periodicals such as Gendaishi Techo, Mita Bungaku, Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun. She produced and performed new work in collaboration with international poets at JUPE (the Japanese UK Poetry Exchange) in 2023 and 2025. She is a member of the 20:30 Poetry Collective based in Tokyo.
James Garza is a writer and translator based in Tokyo. He has a BA and an MA from the University of Arizona, and a PhD from the University of Leeds. His translation of Itō Shizuo’s ‘Going Home’ won the 2019 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation, and his work has appeared in Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation and Asymptote. His co-translation of Osamu Dazai’s The Final Years is slated to be published in 2026. He is currently researching transcreation and the language of the monstrous in horror and speculative fiction.
Help Me Change My Bandages by Maniniwei, translated by Emily Lu (Chinese/Taiwan-Malaysia)
Help Me Change My Bandages speaks from life as a single mother and practicing artist ‘living at the foot of Taipei’. This collection thinks through care, the ways we rely on each other, on our mothers and children and cats, and the ways our care work might reveal our relations to the places we live and to our diasporic histories of migration. Portrayals of poverty lean against the callousness of the current world order as women cook, clean, care, make art.
Maniniwei grew up in Malaysia and studied fine arts at university in Taiwan. Restarting her creative practice after the age of 30 as poet, writer, artist, she is the author of more than twenty books. Her first novel, Ghost Auntie, was selected for the Taipei International Book Fair Prize and was on Yazhou Zhoukan’s 2024 list of top ten novels from Asia. She lives in Taipei with two cats.
Emily Lu is a poet, translator and psychiatrist. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and the Desperate Literature Prize, and was selected for Best Small Fictions. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Night Leaves Nothing New and There is no wifi in the afterlife. She lives in Toronto.
Just Land by Jaku Mata, translated by Eric Abalajon (Filipino)
Jaku Mata’s poems often describe precarious living conditions in the Philippines, both in the urban and rural context, but always point to a way of making do and persevering. In these poems, refuge is something that is simultaneously being created and already here. Mata explores place both as a carrier and a façade, of history and of the future, of affection and of grief, and lastly as a refuge but also a point for departure for elsewhere.
Born in Iloilo, Jaku Mata is a cultural worker and formerly an organizer of fisherfolks and peasants in Negros. He is currently living in Quezon City.
Eric Abalajon’s translations have appeared in Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Firmament Magazine, Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation and Tripwire. He has poetry collections forthcoming from FlowerSong Press and Atomic Bohemian. He lives near Iloilo City.
The Past Is a Lonesome Town by Osdany Morales, translated by Harry Bauld (Spanish)
The poems from The Past is a Lonesome Town are, on the one hand, a lyric sequence shaped by coming of age in small-town Cuba during the late stages of Fidel Castro’s regime – Morales was born in Nueva Paz in 1981 – and on the other a testament of exile, the traces that remain in the wake of forsaking a problematic homeland. Throughout, capitalized English ‘prompts’ are the security questions required of
immigrants hoping to access several online services which the newly arrived Morales only half understood and, indeed, given Morales’ oblique ironies, questions which open trenchant implications for the poet’s new ‘American’ identity.
Osdany Morales was born in Nueva Paz, Cuba, in 1981. He is the author of the short
fiction works Minuciosas puertas estrechas and Antes de los aviones, the novel Papyrus and Zozobra, the nonfiction book Lengua Materna, and the poetry collection El pasado es un pueblo solitario. His work has received the 2006 David Award, a 2008 Casa de Teatro prize, and the 2012 Alejo Carpentier Award. In 2017, Dalkey Archive published the English translation of Papyrus as The Last Librarian, translated by Kristina Bonsager.
Harry Bauld’s poetry collections are The Uncorrected Eye and How to Paint a Dead Man. He was included by Matthew Dickman in Best New Poets 2012 and won the New Millennium Writings Award and the Milton Kessler Poetry Prize. He divides his time between the US and the Basque Country.
Life on Three Wheels by E.M. Palitha Edirisooriya, translated by Samodh Porawagamage and Kasun Pathirage (Sinhala)
Part-docupoetics, part-vignettes, the prose poems in Life on Three Wheels offer an insider’s look into the unexplored subculture of Sri Lankan taxis, known as three-wheelers. Full of sociological depth gained from the poet’s unique vantage point as a three-wheeler driver who talks with passengers, the collection deals with poverty, underdevelopment, environmental destruction, policing, race and class tensions, and gender and family dynamics, while making an impassioned plea for the stewarding of nature and people.
E.M. Palitha Edirisooriya works as a farmer and a three-wheeler driver in and around Dunagaha, Sri Lanka. He has been a columnist and contributor for several national newspapers. In addition to Life on Three Wheels (මාවතේ ත්රීවිල් ජීවිතේ) he has authored a pamphlet on gammadu, a traditional healing ritual of rural Sri Lanka. He dabbles in astrology during his free time.
Samodh Porawagamage is the author of two poetry collections: becoming sam and All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths (forthcoming). His writing focuses on the Sri Lankan Civil War, poverty and underdevelopment, colonial and imperial atrocities, and disproportionate impacts of climate change on rural and marginalized communities. He has worked as a journalist and a teacher.
Kasun Pathirage is a freelance writer and translator based in Colombo. He is currently working on his first book, a collection of Lovecraftian horror with a Sri Lankan twist. His literary translations have been published in The Ex-Puritan, ANMLY and elsewhere. Other than Life on Three Wheels, he has translated the selected poems of Thanuja Lumbini Thambawita.