Words without Borders has just announced that their partner, Gulf Coast (Journal of Literature and Fine Arts) is now accepting entries for the 2015 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation. In 2015, the focus is prose (fiction and nonfiction) in translation. In 2014, the prize was awarded to Kristin Dykstra for her translations of Cuban writer Marcelo Morales (see more on the writer and translator below).

The deadline for entries is August 31, 2015. 

Description: In 2015, the contest is open to prose(fiction and nonfiction) in translation. The winner receives $1,000 and publication in the journal. Two honorable mentions will each receive $250. All entries will be considered for paid publication on our website as Online Exclusives. Entry to the contest also includes a one-year subscription to Gulf Coast, beginning with the issue in which the corresponding prize winners are published.

Guidelines (see additional details in the link below): Send one piece of prose (of up to twenty double-spaced pages) translated into English. Excerpts from longer works are welcome and preference will be given to contemporary work published within the last fifty years. As part of your submission, include the text in its original language, provide a brief synopsis (no more than 200 words) of the work and the author you are translating, and indicate whether you have, and can grant us, permission to publish the original work and the translation.

2014 Winner of the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation (Poetry) Kristin Dykstra is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at St. Michaels College (Vermont). She holds a Phd in English from SUNY at Buffalo. She received a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate a 2006 collection by Cuban writer Reina María Rodríguez, Catch and Release. Among other collections of contemporary Cuban poetry that Dykstra has translated are two books by Omar Pérez, as well as three collections by Juan Carlos Flores, Ángel Escobar, and Rodríguez. Previously she also worked with Rodríguez on Violet Island and Other Poems (co-translated with Nancy Gates Madsen), an anthology culled from earlier phases of Rodríguez’s career when the poet first rose to international renown, as well as the bilingual edition Time’s Arrest/La detención del tiempo. Dykstra is Professor of English at Illinois State University. She co-edits the magazine Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas/Nueva escritura de las Américas with Gabriel Bernal Granados and Roberto Tejada. She won the prize for her translation of Marcelo Morales Cintero’s El mundo como ser (The World as Presence).

Marcelo Morales Cintero, born in Cuba in 1977, is a member of a generation of writers who came of age in Havana during the island’s “Special Period” of severe post-Soviet economic crisis. His influences range from international literature to readings in history and philosophy. Dedicated to the slow development of his book projects, Morales has earned many of his literary awards for segments of larger works in progress. For example, excerpts that would come together to form his 2006 poetry collection El mundo como objeto won the 2004 poetry prize presented by La Gaceta de Cuba, as well as an honorable mention in the national Julián del Casal prize competition and a coveted finalist position in the international Casa de las Américas competition. Morales is also the author of the poetry collections Cinema (1997, Pinos Nuevos prize) and Materia (winner of the 2008 Julián del Casal prize), among others. His novel La espiral appeared in 2006. Morales edited and introduced Como un huésped de la noche, an anthology of poetry by Roberto Branly, published in 2010.

For more on Gulf Coast Prize and how to enter, see http://gulfcoastmag.org/contests/prize-in-translation?src=WWB

For more information on Morales and Dykstra, see http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/spanish/excerpts-from-the-visionary-circle-by-marcelo-morales