Meet IALA’s 2023 Israelyan English Translation Grant Recipients
We would like to thank everyone for submitting to the 2023 Israelyan English Translation Grant. This was our second year offering such a grant, and we were grateful for the submissions we received during this particularly difficult time. We’re fortunate to have read from so many works-in-translation across a variety of genres.
This year’s grant was for any work of literature (in any form) written in Eastern Armenian and published any time after 1900. From the submissions received, the judges were unable to decide between their top two choices. In light of this, and in pursuit of IALA’s commitment to make more Armenian literature available to a broader audience, we are very pleased to award the grant to both works: Yeghishe Charents’ Land of Nayiri (Երկիր Նաիրի), translated by Thomas Toghramadjian, and Ruben Filyan’s Your Country’s Ambassador (Քո երկրի դեսպանը), translated by Margarit Ordukhanyan.
Thomas Toghramadjian is a deacon of the Armenian Church, a teacher, and a student of Armenian literature. Born and raised in the United States, he received his bachelor’s degree from Boston College in political science, English, and Russian studies before repatriating to Armenia in 2019. Between 2019 and 2021 he completed a two-year fellowship with Teach For Armenia, living and teaching English in the village of Debed in Lori Province. Thomas is currently pursuing a master’s degree in modern Armenian literature at Yerevan State University, writing his thesis on Yeghishe Charents and the Symbolist movement. Read Toghramadjian’s recent translation piece here.
Margarit Ordukhanyan, PhD is a New York-based scholar and translator of poetry and prose from her native Armenian and Russian into English. In addition to contributing translations to collections and anthologies both in the United States and abroad, she also studies literary bilingualism, translation theory, and the role of translation pedagogy in language and humanities curricula. Among others, she focuses on the works of exophonic Armenian women writers, including Goar Markosyan-Kasper, whose Russian-language novel Пенелопа (Penelope) she is currently translating into English. Narine Abgaryan’s To Go On Living, co-translated by Ordukhanyan and Zara Torlone, is forthcoming from Plough Publishers. Ordukhanyan was the Fall 2022 Translator-in-Residence at the University of Iowa’s Translation Workshop and a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellow. She is currently a fellow at the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities at the New York Public Library.
We thank everyone for their submission, and our judges Dr. Myrna Douzjian, Nairi Hakhverdi and Tatevik Ayvazyan for their invaluable time. We will announce the 2024 grants early next year!
The Israelyan English Translation Grant from the International Armenian Literary Alliance was made possible by a generous donation from Souren A. Israelyan, whose funding will ensure more Armenian literature is translated into English. Learn more about the grant, and meet our 2023 Creative Writing Grant recipient here.