(Bottom row) Samantha Mateo; Priyamvada Ramkumar; Emma Roy; Shanna Tan; Alisa Yamasaki; Kenny Yim (photo credit: Mim on Roseway)
Image Description: Thirteen individual pictures of people with various backgrounds. For individual image descriptions, please visit the mentees’ “Learn More” pages.
February 10, 2022—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is pleased to announce the mentees for the seventh year of the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program! Congratulations to our thirteen exceptional emerging translators, listed here in alphabetical order by surname:
Sandra Chen (Literature from Taiwan)
Sandra Chen is an emerging translator from the Bay Area, working in English, Chinese, and French. She is currently an undergraduate student at Princeton University, where she is pursuing a concentration in Comparative Literature and a certificate in Translation and Intercultural Communication. Learn more about Sandra.
Angelina Coronado (Non-language-specific BIPOC mentorship)
Angelina Coronado is a translator and scholar of Latin American and Iberian literature. She is currently a student and Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow at The City College of New York, studying English Literature and Portuguese. With the support of the ALTA mentorship, she will be translating Orlanda Amarílis’ Cais-do-Sodré to Salamansa from Portuguese. Learn more about Angelina.
Brad Harmon (Swedish)
Brad Harmon is a translator from primarily Swedish and German. He studied Scandinavian and German Studies at the Universities of Minnesota and Washington. He is currently a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University. His first book translation was Måns Mosesson’s Tim: The Official Biography of Avicii (Sphere 2021). Learn more about Brad.
Tamina Hauser (Korean Prose)
Tamina Hauser is a translator and editor based in South Korea. At university, she majored in Translation and Korean Studies. She subsequently spent several years in Hong Kong working in the publishing industry. In 2020, she received the LTI Korea Award for Aspiring Translators and is currently enrolled at LTI Korea’s Translation Academy. Learn more about Tamina.
Helena Kernan (Russian Prose)
Helena Kernan holds MA degrees in Slavic Studies from the University of Cambridge and University of California, Berkeley and works as a translator, editor and researcher. Originally from the UK, she has lived in Kyiv, Moscow, St Petersburg, Paris and Berlin. Her translations have been published by Ugly Duckling Presse, Isolarii and Words Without Borders and are forthcoming at Princeton University Press. Learn more about Helena.
Sean LaRiche (Polish)
Sean LaRiche is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist who works with children and adolescents on an inpatient psychiatric unit at a hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina. He taught English in Poland for several years and developed a longstanding interest in Polish literature. For his mentorship he will translate a collection of prose poems by Jakub Kornhauser called The Yeast Works [Drożdżownia]. Learn more about Sean.
Archana Madhavan (Korean Poetry)
Archana Madhavan is a writer and translator, who juggles a career in tech. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Modern Poetry in Translation, Korean Literature Now, The Puritan, and elsewhere. Her first book-length work is a co-translation of Glory Hole by Kim Hyun (Seagull Books, May 2022). Learn more about Archana.
Samantha Mateo (Catalan)
Samantha Mateo is a translator from Chicago. She received an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago, specializing in Catalan and translation studies. She most recently joined a university press as an Editorial Associate. Her interests and work concern minoritized languages and literatures, diglossia, heritage languages, and immigrant narratives. Learn more about Samantha.
Priyamvada Ramkumar (Non-language-specific, non-genre-specific)
Based in Chennai, India, Priyamvada Ramkumar translates from her native tongue, Tamil into English. Her first book-length translation was selected under the South Asia Speaks mentorship programme and will be published in 2022. With the support of ALTA’s mentorship, she will work on a translation of B. Jeyamohan’s Vellai Yaanai from Tamil. Learn more about Priyamvada.
Emma Roy (Prose from Quebec)
Emma Roy is a queer translator based in Tiotia:khe (Montréal). She recently completed a BA in translation and creative writing from Concordia University. With her mentor Linda Gaboriau, Emma will be translating her first book-length project, Anne-Élaine Cliche’s Le danseur de La Macaza. Learn more about Emma.
Shanna Tan (Literature from Singapore)
Shanna Tan is a Singaporean translator working from Korean, Chinese and Japanese into English. She is drawn to prose on heritage and space, as well as stories giving voices to ordinary folks and their struggles. She was selected for the National Centre for Writing’s 2022 Emerging Translator Mentorship, translating Korean prose under the guidance of mentor Anton Hur. Learn more about Shanna.
Alisa Yamasaki (Japanese)
Alisa Yamasaki is a freelance translator and journalist from Tokyo, currently based in New York. She received her MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University in 2020. With a background mainly in commercial translation, this will be her first endeavor in literary translation. Learn more about Alisa.
Kenny Yim (Literature from Singapore)
Kenny Sui-Fung Yim (嚴兆豐) has lived in Massachusetts since 2005, with a two-year interlude living trans-pacifically in Southern China and Hong Kong. While teaching in Asia, he visited Cambodia, Việt Nam, and Thailand. He twice studied trans-atlantically with Oxford tutor Jeri Johnson. Boston is now homebase. Learn more about Kenny.
The 2022 ALTA mentees will share their work at a reading later this year. Details forthcoming.
These 13 mentorships are available in 2022 in partnership with Amazon Crossing, the Institut Ramon Llull, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, the National Arts Council Singapore, the Polish Cultural Institute New York, the Russian Federation Institute for Literary Translation, the Swedish Arts Council, Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles (TECO-LA), the Québec Government Office in New York, the Yanai Initiative, and generous individual donors.
Details about the program and this year’s mentors are available at www.literarytranslators.org/awards/mentorships.
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