Guest editor Emily Wilson
Series edited by Noh Anothai, Wendy Call, Sara Elkamel & Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún
Best Literary Translations redefines the canon of global literatures in English translation, showcasing the brave and brilliant work of contemporary translators and editors.
Publication Date: April 6th, 2027
Paperback ISBN: 9781646054657
eBook ISBN: 9781646054664
Description
Guest edited by Emily Wilson, Best Literary Translations 2027 features poetry and prose that gives voice to the world’s collective grief, struggle, and joy, brought into English by some of the most talented translators working today.
The fourth installment of the Best Literary Translations anthology features prose and poetry translated from over 20 different languages—including rarely-translated dialects including Cherokee, Afrikaans, Diné, and Bahasa Indonesian. These literary works shine a spotlight on some of the world’s dark corners: a Ukrainian poet and combat medic writes from within the ongoing war; a Salvadoran author traces the terrifying history of forced disappearance; a Palestinian writer looks back at the wreckage of Gaza while on a humanitarian caravan to Europe. Throughout the 34 works featured in this year’s anthology, each accompanied by a translator’s note reflecting on the discovery, translation, and resonance of the original work, Best Literary Translations brings forth urgent voices that bear unflinching witness to personal and collective devastation, and find moments of surprise and beauty within it.
Biographical Note
Emily Wilson is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. in Classics and Corpus Christi College M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature) and Yale University (Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature). She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She is an editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, and edited a volume of new essays on ancient tragedy. She has published Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Johns Hopkins); The Death of Socrates: Hero, villain, chatterbox, saint (Harvard UP/Profile Books), and The Greatest Empire: A life of Seneca (Oxford UP), as well as Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Travels through ancient literature (Profile Books/ Norton). She has written introductions for several works of ancient literature in translation, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Charles Martin translation, Norton) and Virgil’s Aeneid (McGill/ Wright translation, Norton). She has published multiple articles about ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy and its later receptions and translations. She has also published verse translations of Seneca’s tragedies, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, four plays by Euripides, the Odyssey, and the Iliad. Current projects include more translations, and a cluster of projects about Greek mythology. She lives in Philadelphia.
Noh Anothai’s translations range from classical Siamese poets to contemporary Thai authors. Anothai has also served as a judge for the Lucien Stryk Prize for Asian Literature in Translation and taught Creative Writing for almost a decade. Anothai received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Track for International Writers, at Washington University in St. Louis in 2023.
Wendy Call is the author, co-editor, or translator of eight books. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia and Translator in Residence at the University of Iowa, as well as a fellow of Cornell University’s Institute of Comparative Modernities and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches creative nonfiction in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist, and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021) and Garden City (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2026). Her translations include Mona Kareem’s chapbook, I Will Not Fold These Maps (Poetry Translation Centre, 2023) and Dalia Taha’s Enter World (Graywolf Press, 2026). A Pushcart Prize winner, Elkamel was also awarded Southeast Review’s 2023 Gearhart Poetry Prize, the Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2022 Goldstein Poetry Prize, Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and placed first in Redivider’s 2021 Blurred Genre Contest and Columbia Journal’s 2025 Online Translation Contest.
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is the publisher of OlongoAfrica.com. A Nigerian writer and linguist, he has authored two poetry collections, Edwardsville by Heart (2018) and Ìgbà Èwe (2021), and a multimedia dictionary of names. He is a Fulbright Scholar (2009) and a Chevening Research Fellow at the British Library in London (2019/2020). His work in language advocacy earned him the Premio Ostana Special Prize in 2016.
Reviews
Praise for Best Literary Translations
“If the series’ goal is to stretch the reader’s horizons, it is brilliantly reached. Deep Vellum has created a hub of world literature on the Southern Plains, a region of rich yet overlooked linguistic diversity.” —World Literature Today
“A vibrant, urgent, and deeply resonant anthology that foregrounds the art and politics of translation as much as the original works themselves.” —On the Seawall
“Best Literary Translations is full of standouts and surprises, an im—World Literature Todaypressive collection in which one detects the care and attention paid by the various editors to broaden the literary field.” —The Markaz Review
“BLT 2024 at once advocates to a wider audience for the importance of publishing and reading literary translations, and makes important claims within the translation community about the practice’s possibilities, argued forcefully on political and aesthetic grounds.” —North American Review
“The anthology series aims to celebrate world literature, and honor the brilliant work of translators and the literary journals that publish this work.” —Poets & Writers
“The collection celebrates the multiplicity of artforms and languages. Here is Old Egyptian, and Chinese, and Italian, and Tigrinya, and Kurdish, and Burmese, and Greek, and Russian. I could fill the page with the languages of the collection. It is refreshing to see all these languages within the same covers.” —Reading in Translation