2024 Submissions Call

Second Submissions Call for the Armory Square Prize

January 31, 2024

SKANEATELES, NEW YORK: The Armory Square Prize opened submissions today for its second annual literary prize for a translation from a South Asian language. With an aim to cultivate a new generation of literary translators working from South Asian languages, this year the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation will recognize an outstanding translation of narrative prose written by a South Asian woman author in a language other than English. 

Shortlisted translators will have an excerpt from their work published by Words Without Borders (WWB), the premier online magazine for literature in translation. Excerpts from the 2023 prize shortlist can be read here in the magazine.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi was winner of the 2023 Armory Square Prize. His English translation from Urdu of Siddique Alam’s The Kettledrum and Other Stories will be published by Open Letter Books in December 2024. Juror Arunava Sinha said of Farooqi:

[His] limpid and elegant translation infuses the intersectional world of primal practices and contemporary conflicts in Siddique Alam's stories with both the controlled grace of the original Urdu and the author's spartan clarity. Alam tells authentic stories that are both grounded and soaring, and Farooqi follows his text without missing a beat.

The Armory Square prize is an effort to remedy the stark disparities in literary translation worldwide and support English translations of compelling storytellers from the Indian Subcontinent. Now in its second year, the prize will continue to recognize stellar talent and accomplishments often overlooked in the English-speaking world.

“Traditionally there have been limited investments associated with translating the canon of literature in South Asian languages into English. We welcome the chance to help identify more leading translators and writers this year to follow last year’s crop of finalists from our inaugural year. Translators working in underrepresented languages like Tamil, Assamese, Urdu, and Hindi found a burgeoning literary community to engage with, one that is ardently making the world of translated literature more visible and accessible,” said Pia Sawhney, a juror and Cofounder of Armory Square Ventures, the venture capital firm that sponsors the prize each year.

“Our financial investments consistently infuse optimism and momentum into promising but overlooked areas of the United States,” says Sawhney. “With this prize, we aim to build bridges tothe future between readers from the United States and those from Asia. We have an extraordinary jury again this year and could not be more pleased to introduce English-speaking readers to a fresh and provocative new body of literature.”

This year’s jury brings together award-winning specialists in literary translation. Originally from Buffalo, NY, Jury Chair Jason Grunebaum is a literary translator from Hindi and an instructional professor at the University of Chicago. He is a translator of Manzoor Ahtesham and Uday Prakash, among other Hindi writers, and teaches both Hindi and literary translation.

The complete list of judges (in alphabetical order) is below:

Jason Grunebaum (Jury Chair), translator from Hindi: shortlisted for DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, winner of an NEA Literature Fellowship in Translation, winner of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, and codirector of the SALT Project.

Shahnaz Habib, translator from Malayalam: winner of JCB Prize for Literature.

Sawad Hussain, translator from Arabic: winner of the English PEN translation award, winner of a RSL Literature Matters award, co-editor of Oxford Arabic Dictionary.

Daisy Rockwell, translator from Hindi and Urdu: 2022 International Booker winner, winner of MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize.

Pia Sawhney, Partner, Armory Square Ventures: Previous winner of the Amnesty International DOEN Award for Human Rights for work as a documentary filmmaker and journalist.

Arunava Sinha, translator from Bangla: Winner of 2022 Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award, twice winner of Crossword translation award, shortlisted for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, shortlisted for the National Translation Award.

Deena Chalabi, curator: Her work explores relationships between individual expression, critical thought, and public imagination. Her writing has appeared in publications including Bidoun, The New Inquiry and the Journal of Visual Culture. 

“It is thrilling to realize the second year of this prize and open submissions. Last year’s cycle has already had ripple effects across the translation world, and we expect these positive forces to strengthen,” said Grunebaum, Jury Chair for the prize and one of the jury’s inaugural members. “This year we hope to bring more South Asian voices into a nurturing literary ecosystem and on to bookshelves. We're also creating spaces to form sustainable relationships between publishers in the Subcontinent and those beyond, something that makes this year’s submissions announcement particularly valuable. Many of our jurors mentored last year’s shortlisted translators, and we anticipate building on that success with this year’s finalists as well.”

The prize jury will first and foremost consider the quality of the translation, paying particular attention to the creative and artful solutions that the translator has used to address the challenges posed by the work. The jury will also consider the significance of the original work and its author, and the extent to which the language and author are underrepresented in English.

The Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation was launched to inspire new directions for translators into English from one of the most diverse, historically complex, and culturally vibrant regions of the world. Of the nearly 7,600 books published in translation in the United States over the past decade, only 64, fewer than 1%, originated from a South Asian language, even though these languages are spoken by a full one-fifth of the world’s population.

The prize is open to translators of literature written by a South Asian woman author in a language other than English. Any book-length work of narrative prose, fiction, or nonfiction, by a South Asian woman author (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Maldives or the diaspora) will be eligible.

The deadline for applications is April 1st, 2024. The shortlist and winner will be announced in Spring 2024. Like last year, the award recipient’s book will be published by Open Letter Books in Fall 2025. The Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation is sponsored by Armory Square Ventures.

About Armory Square Ventures in Skaneateles, New York 

Armory Square Ventures (ASV) is a diverse, leading technology venture capital firm that strives to be a community catalyst across all of New York State. With offices in the Finger Lakes and New York City, ASV arose out of the desire to seed opportunities and jobs for those based in our region and beyond. As such, we are an optimism engine for ecosystems outside of Silicon Valley, supporting B2B and tech-enabled software startups to source talent, resources and capital. Our focus lies in places overlooked by other investors. The fund’s investments include ACV Auctions (NASDAQ: ACVA), Agronomic Technology Corporation (acquired by Yara), BentoBox CMS (acquired by Fiserv), Compyl, Clerio Vision, Good Uncle (acquired by Aramark), Heretto, Machinery Partner, Multiplayer, RealEats, Squarefoot, StorySlab, Vengo Labs, Vizbee, UCM Digital, 8B and Moxie.

For more information about the prize, contact Regan Hofmann at regan@armorysv.com.

About Open Letter Books in Rochester, New York 

Open Letter—the University of Rochester's nonprofit, literary translation press—is one of only a handful of publishing houses dedicated to increasing access to world literature for English readers. Publishing ten titles in translation each year and running an online literary website called Three Percent, Open Letter searches for works that are extraordinary and influential, works that we hope will become the classics of tomorrow.