You’re invited to the livestream of the 2023 Ottaway Award ceremony! Join us for a laudation by translator and writer Esther Allen, followed by remarks by award winner Daniel Hahn. The recording will be available to view on our YouTube channel after the event.
“I can think of no individual who has made as big of an impact in the literary translation field in as little time as Danny Hahn.”
—Samantha Schnee, translator and WWB board chair
Named in honor of the first chair of Words Without Borders, Jim Ottaway, Jr., the Ottaway Award recognizes an individual whose work and activism have supported WWB’s mission of promoting cultural understanding through the publication and promotion of international literature. Read our press release here.
Tech and accessibility information
This event will be hosted on Zoom, which is available for download here. You’ll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Your display name should match the name you use to register for the event. You can change your Zoom display name by following these instructions.
In-app closed captioning and a full transcript will be available for this event. While in the meeting, you can toggle this on and off by clicking the “Live Transcription/CC” button at the bottom of your screen. You will not be able to turn on your own audio and video for this Zoom event.
About the speakers
An award-winning writer, editor, and translator with nearly one hundred titles to his name, Daniel Hahn’s work includes translations from Europe, Africa, and the Americas (encompassing fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and plays), and a number of nonfiction books, including The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. He has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Blue Peter Book Award and been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, among many others. Hahn routinely uses his platform to advocate for translators and raise public understanding of literary translation. In addition to his public speaking and translation workshops each year, Hahn’s own writing has sought to demystify the art and craft of literary translation.
Esther Allen’s translations include the Penguin Classics anthology José Martí: Selected Writings, Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia by José Manuel Prieto, Lands of Memory by Felisberto Hernández, Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution, and Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto. With Susan Bernofsky, she edited In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means. She edited and wrote for To Be Translated or Not To Be (Institut Ramon Llull, 2007), the PEN International report on translation and globalization. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, she was named a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the French government for her work promoting a culture of translation in English. She teaches at the Graduate Center and Baruch College, City University of New York. Her website is estherallen.com.