The Society of Authors is delighted to announce the launch of the John Calder Translation Prize, an annual award for translations into English of full-length ambitious, groundbreaking works of literary merit and general interest. 

The prize, which opens for submissions in January 2025, will see the winner awarded £3,000 and a runner-up awarded £1,000 at the Society of Authors’ Translation Prizes ceremony in February 2026.

Submissions can be from any language into English. Works must be full-length, but can be fiction, non-fiction or poetry.

The prize is awarded in honour of the late John Calder, one of the pre-eminent English-Language publishers of avant-garde literature in the second half of the twentieth century.

He championed fiction in translation, as well as the free word and authors who were suppressed or discriminated against for political or other reasons.

Under Calder’s stewardship, his publishing house brought out novels, plays and poetry by Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Raymond Queneau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget and many others. 

Works submitted to the John Calder Translation Prize are encouraged to be ambitious in nature, by virtue of style, exploration of themes or complexity of the translation, and distinguished by the highly personal and imaginative approach of the authors to their subject.

Author and translator, Richard Stokes, who is a member of the John Calder Translation Prize advisory board, said:

The translator’s lot is not a happy one. The highest praise that readers can pay translators is to say that their work does not read like a translation. Translators are not always mentioned on the cover of a book and they are paid a pittance. The John Calder Translation Prize will be welcomed by this unsung band of men and women who, through their devotion to foreign prose and poetry, make it available to those of us who are less linguistically gifted.

This article was edited on 5 December to remove the reference to European-language works. In response to feedback from the translation community, the John Calder Prize will now be open to translations in English from any language.