Jessica Cortes-Allsopp, a graduate of the BA (Hons) in Italian and French, has won a prestigious Translation Challenge and collected her prize money of £250 at the Hay Festival on 28 May.

The Translation Challenge was established by Translators’ House Wales in 2009 to promote and celebrate the crucial contribution translators make to enabling literature to travel across frontiers and to draw attention to literary translation as a creative art. It is organised by Wales PEN Cymru and Wales Literature Exchange and sponsored by Swansea University’s College of Arts and Humanities. This year’s competition was to translate a poem by Mexican Poet Pedro Serrano from Spanish into either English or Welsh. Jessica is this year’s English Language winner.

In his adjudication, Richard Gwyn, writer, academic and world-traveller, praised Jessica’s ‘tight and accurate translation, consistently reproducing the complexities of Serrano’s language better than other entrants, and maintaining a rhythm that measures up against that of the original.’

Jessica graduated in 2015 and is due to start an MA in Translation at UCL in September. She said: ‘It is an honour to have been named the winner of this challenge, it is hugely encouraging considering translation is what I enjoyed most about my undergraduate degree and has also given me great confidence in my decision to pursue it at postgraduate level. I would especially like to thank the French and Italian departments at the University of Kent for their continued support and for helping me to develop my passion for translation and language learning.’

For more details on the Translation Challenge, see the Wales Literature Exchange page.