The 2022 Niki Marangou Translation Prize: Call for submissions

Open to current students at any English uinversity. Closing date: 9 September 2022.

The Niki Marangou Prize was first established in 2016 to honour the memory of the inspirational Cypriot poet, novelist, and painter Niki Marangou, who died in 2013. From 2019 onwards, the prize has been awarded annually for a literary translation from Modern Greek into English of one poem and one prose extract from the work of Niki Marangou.

The value of the Niki Marangou Translation Prize is £500. Participants select two full pages from any of the published works by Niki Marangou to translate, whether from her poetry collections or from her prose works. Participants also add a cover letter in which they place the chosen work in context (1 page). Entries must be submitted electronically, as a single pdf scan (original Greek text + translation + 1p. cover letter), by the deadline of 16:00 on 9 September 2022, by emailing them to gonda.van_steen@kcl.ac.uk (Prof. Gonda Van Steen) and to ag585@cam.ac.uk (Dr Liana Giannakopoulou). The competition is open to all BA, MA or PhD students currently enrolled in any England-based university. All entries will be judged by a panel of three members of the teaching staff in Modern Greek Studies. The panel will normally include and be chaired by the Koraes Professor at King’s College London. Winning entries may be published on the Niki Marangou website.

The award will be announced on 28 October 2022, at the fourth Niki Marangou Annual Memorial Lecture, co-organised with King’s Centre for Hellenic Studies. This fourth Niki Marangou Lecture will be held in London, and the featured speaker will be the former diplomat and King’s alumna, Dr Catherine Boura.

Niki Marangou (1948-2013) was born in Limassol, Cyprus, but part of her family hailed from Famagusta. She was an acclaimed writer and painter. She studied sociology in West Berlin from 1965 to 1970. After graduating, she worked as a dramaturge at the State Theatre of Cyprus. Marangou published books of prose, poetry, and children’s fairy tales, and she held seven exhibitions of her work in painting. She won numerous prizes, including the 1998 C.P. Cavafy Prize for Poetry and the 2006 Athens Academy Poetry Award for her collection Divan. She was a member of the Hellenic Authors Society and the Cyprus Writers Association. From 1980 to 2007, she was the director of the Kochlias Bookshop in Nicosia. Marangou died in a car accident in Egypt in 2013.

Previous Niki Marangou Prize Winners were:

2021 Elpiniki Meimaroglou

2020 Nicholas Kabanas

2019 Petros Nicolaou

2018 Eleonora Colli.

Previous winners of the Niki Marangou Undergraduate Prize were:

2017 Felicity Beech

2016 Konstantinos Lygouris.

For more information in context, see https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/centre-for-hellenic-studies (tabs ‘Awards’ and ‘Activity’). See also: https://21in21.co.uk/events/.