English PEN’s flagship translation grant programme, PEN Translates, announced its latest round of winners, awarding grants to 18 titles from 14 publishers across 12 languages and 16 regions. Three of those titles come from African writers — from Egypt, Sudan, and Mauritius — and one of them makes history as the first Mauritian title ever to receive a PEN Translates award.

The Egyptian title is The Field by Hamdi Abu Golayyel, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger and published by Saqi Books. Abu Golayyel — who passed away in June 2023 — was one of Egypt’s most distinctive literary voices, born in Fayoum and widely described as a chronicler of the lives of Egypt’s marginalised and working class. Three of his novels have previously been translated into English: Thieves in Retirement (tr. Marilyn Booth, 2006), A Dog with No Tail(tr. Robin Moger, 2009), which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2008, and The Men Who Swallowed the Sun (tr. Humphrey Davies, 2022), whose translator was joint winner of the 2022 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. The Field will be a welcome return of his work to English-language readers. The Sudanese title is Under the Neem Tree by Rania Mamoun, a Sudanese activist and bestselling writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette and published by Comma Press. Jaquette previously translated Mamoun’s Thirteen Months of Sunrise (Comma Press, 2019), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and was itself a PEN Translates award winner, making this a continuation of a celebrated translating partnership.

The most historic of the three is The Rasta’s Song by Sharon Paul from Mauritius, translated from the French and Mauritian Creole by Nadiyah Abdullatif and published by Balestier Press. This is the first time a title from Mauritius has ever received a PEN Translates award, a milestone that reflects both the programme’s expanding geographic reach and the growing recognition that Francophone and Creole-language African literatures deserve a place in the global translation conversation. The inclusion of Mauritian Creole as a source language is itself significant: it joins Slovak as one of two languages appearing in the PEN Translates portfolio for the first time in this round.

PEN Translates has now supported over 400 books translated from over 90 languages, awarding over £1.2m in grants since its inception. Books are selected on the basis of outstanding literary quality, the strength of the publishing project, and their contribution to UK bibliodiversity. The programme’s Translation Advisory Co-chair Nichola Smalley described this round as giving “hope for the future of UK translation publishing” and for African literature specifically, three grants in a single round, including a historic first, is a result worth celebrating!