Mara Faye Lethem wins the 2026 National Translation Award in Prose

Mara Faye Lethem's stunning translation of I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà (published by Graywolf Press in the US and Granta in the UK) has won the 2026 National Translation Award in Prose. This year’s prose judges are Addie Leak, Eva Apelqvist, Hanna Leliv, N Kalyan Raman, and Priscilla Layne. The winner receives a $4,000 cash prize. 

This is what the judges had to say about Mara's translation: 

Replete with folktale, false piety, and real darkness, Irene Solà’s vibrant novel takes place in an old farmhouse in the Catalonian mountains, where an old woman lies dying. The novel jumps in time through hundreds of years as it recounts the stories of the family’s women: the matriarch who made a Faustian deal for a husband only to trick the devil, and the ensuing generations of fallout. Meanwhile, these same women, now ghosts, wait (im)patiently for the last of their party. Mara Faye Lethem’s translation is earthy and lyrical, and she renders the women’s ribald stories into knee-slappingly funny English.

About the National Translation Awards: 

The National Translation Award is awarded annually in poetry and in prose to literary translators who have made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality. The NTA, which is administered by American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), is the only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work.