The winner of the 2019 Translation Challenge, Paul Kaye, was announced at the Wales Pen Cymru event in Hay Festival on 25 May.
Paul Kaye works as a language officer at the European Commission’s Representation in the UK, based in London, responsible for various forms of language and translation-related outreach work for the EU. The post is a secondment from the Commission’s translation service in Brussels, where he translated legal and technical documents from Slovak, Czech, Polish, French and Hungarian into English.
In his first steps into literary translation he has chosen to focus on Polish and has a particular interest in graphic novels and literary non-fiction and reportage. Earlier he worked for 10 years as an environment policy journalist, mainly in Brussels, and before that in Bratislava, Slovakia, as an English teacher, radio and print journalist and translator. He grew up in Bolton, Lancashire and studied biology at Sussex University.
Paul Kaye will receive a £200 cash prize.
The challenge this year was to translate three poems by contemporary Polish poet, Wioletta Greg.
The Translation Challenge was organized by Wales PEN Cymru and Wales Literature Exchange in collaboration with Swansea University, the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, the Polish Cultural Institute and Poetry Wales.
Eleven entries came to hand and the adjudicator Antonia Lloyd-Jones commented:
“The top entries for the poetry translation contest were of an extremely high standard, and it was hard to choose between them.”
