Lit 50 2023: Translation

For this year’s list, we organize everything by category.

Lit 50 2023: Who Really Books In Chicago introduction
Lit 50 2023: Nonfiction
Lit 50 2023: Comics & Kids Books
Lit 50 2023: Poetry
Lit 50 2023: Fiction

Third Coast Translators Collective

Chicago is home to an extraordinarily diverse set of writers, but the city is also home to a multitude of literary translators (many of them immigrants) who represent and work from dozens of minority, underrepresented or even endangered languages to bring the literature of the world into English, in the process making political statements as much as literary ones.

The Third Coast Translators Collective (TCTC) was founded in 2016 in Chicago by a core group of founding members including Amanda Sarasien, Lucina Schell, Jason Grunebaum, Amaia Gabantxo, Annie Janusch, Aviya Kushner, Izidora Angel and Denise Kripper, and has since grown to include nearly thirty literary translators working from over a dozen languages, including Russian, Basque, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Italian, Hindi, Bulgarian, Catalan, Japanese, Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), Hebrew, Arabic and Mandarin.

While the writing business can often feel competitive and exclusionary, for TCTC members, the community they’ve built is anything but; the collective is comprised of members in all different stages of their careers, from college students to acclaimed translators and professors, all deeply committed to mentorship. Members workshop manuscripts, share industry knowledge and resources, attend each other’s readings, and advise each other on publications, residencies and grant applications.

In the last five years, members have translated and published over twenty-two full-length books, been awarded five National Endowment for the Arts grants, received awards including the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and The Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, attended prestigious residencies like Bread Loaf, and have been featured in publications including The New York Times, Granta, Michigan Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, LitHub and The Chicago Review of Books.

Looking to the future, TCTC members have discussed widening community outreach, deepening professional development, creating more programming for translators and non-translators alike, offering more public workshops, participating in more international literary festivals, and continuing the collective’s mission of recruiting more members representative of Chicago’s uniquely diverse linguistic population.

In addition to the founding members listed above, TCTC includes Winifred Bird, Neil Blackadder, Joey Carney, Caroline Carter, Kevin Gerry Dunn, Slava Faybysh, Dan Hanrahan, Mary Hawley, Kay Heikkinen, Lilian Huang, Chenxin Jiang, Kolin Jordan, Susanna Lang, Sam Mateo, Kristen Renee Miller, Alta L. Price, Sarah A. Rae, Matthew Smith, Maja Teref, Steven Teref and Ellen Vayner. (Billy Lombardo)