Archana Venkatesan Wins ALTA Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize

Archana Venkatesan, Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature at UC Davis, has been awarded the American Literary Translators Association's Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize for Endless Song, her translation of the Tiruvāymoḻi by 9th-century Tamil poet Nammāḻvār. The book is the first work of South Asian Literature and the first Tamil work to win the award.

According to the judges, Venkatesan's translation allows this "dizzing, ecstatic" Tamil poem to "sing to us in the English-speaking world as well." The judges praise Venkatesan for creating a translation that is at once a "well-annotated, definitive work of scholarship" and a "living, breathing work of contemporary poetry."

You can read more about the prize and about Vankatesan's work at the ATLA website.