Banff Center Literary Translation Residency

The Center was at the annual American Literary Translators' Association conference last week, and I'm going to be blogging the panels that we attended. Yesterday I wrote about the roundtable on publishing literary translations. Today it's the incredible opportunity for translators that is the Banff translation residency.

Katie Silver's information session on the Banff Center's translation residency program was definitely one of the more worthwhile things I saw at ALTA. If you're a translator and you fit Banff's criteria, I can't imagine why on Earth you wouldn't apply for this. It sounds incredible.

So here's the deal: each year Banff does a 3-week residency for 15 translators, 3 of whom are student translators. You pay the cost of getting there, they pay everything else. You get meals cooked for you, you get to hang out with a community of translators every day for three weeks, they bring your author out to work with you for a week, there's hiking in the mountains, chamber music, theater, workshops, cabarets, parties. Numerous people in the audience testified to the extraordinary contacts they built and maintained at this residency, and everyone absolutely loved it. I don't even translate, and I want to go.

The residency is open to open to literary translators from Canada, Mexico, and the United States translating from any language, and to international translators working on literature from the Americas. Applicants must have published at least one book-length project (student applicants excepted), and you can apply online. The deadline for the 2011 residencies is Feb 15, and the 2011 residency runs from June 6 through June 25.