AI is everywhere, in our inboxes and search results, our apps and social media feeds. More recently, it’s started creeping into the literary world—and translators are not immune.
In fact, a 2025 study names translators as the group whose profession is most threatened by the rise of AI. Writers are not far behind, coming in third place.
At WWB, we know that writing and literary translation are complex art forms requiring vast amounts of creativity, and that this human creativity is ultimately what gives art meaning.
Literary artists matter, and the work that sustains them should not be turned over to machines.
At WWB, valuing the work of literary artists has never been an abstract concept. For nearly twenty-five years, we have paid writers and translators equally. And in 2023, we were proud to increase our contributor payments by 20%.
This year, we will again raise the pay we offer to our contributors. Reasonable pay ensures that writers and translators from communities that have long faced barriers to entry can join the field. It also ensures that the literary canon includes the diverse range of voices and perspectives that readers deserve.
Raising our contributor pay will cost us $30,000 over the next three years, and it won’t be possible without your help.
Show authors and translators that their work has value. Support writers and translators by donating today at the link in our bio.
Laurence Laluyaux, head of RCW International at the RCW Literary Agency and an agent for internationally renowned authors including three Nobel laureates, will receive the 2026 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature, Words Without Borders announced today.
Laluyaux represents writers including Han Kang, László Krasznahorkai, and Olga Tokarczuk, as well as Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Chris Kraus, Valeria Luiselli, Olga Ravn, Keith Ridgway, Sara Stridsberg, and Alia Trabucco Zerán. Her authors have won or been nominated for the Nobel Prize, the Booker Prize, the International Booker Prize, the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the Folio Rathbone Prize, the Goldsmith Prize, the Dublin Literary Award Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize, as well as prestigious international prizes such as the Prix Femina, Prix Femina étranger, Prix Medicis, Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman (France), the Kossuth Prize (Hungary), the Nike Award (Poland), the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize (Sweden), the Prix Formentor (Spain), the Buchpreis (Germany), the Jabuti Prize (Brazil), the Politikens Literature Prize (Denmark), and the Optimist Award (Iceland).
Read more about Laluyaux’s work, and take a look at what her authors say about her, at the link in our bio.
We're hiring! Head to our website and read more about our three open and remote positions: Finance and Operations Manager (FT), Engagement Editor (PT), and Administrative and Development Assistant (FT). Applications close on May 14.
Learn more and apply: wordswithoutborders.org/jobs
Spend some time with these three poems by Ricardo Aleixo, translated from Portuguese by Dan Hanrahan. First published in 2018 in our issue “Another Country: Afro-Brazilian Writing,” these poems consider how identity is shaped by an individual's internal and external worlds and offer a toolkit of resistance against oppressive environments.
Find all three poems—“My Man,” “I Know You By Your Scent,” and “Night of Calunga in the Bairro Cabula”—as well as a video of Aleixo reading at the link in our bio.
“Passion lives in political imagination; among thousands of orchards; in homes built of willow and walnut palm; on rooftops made of sugarcane stalks, red clay, and Acre rock powder; by the old port, sea fret on your face and fishermen hauling in nets full of sardines and sea bream; in the wedding songs: ‘Oh bride, you garland in a stream, you pearl from Bilad al-Sham, worth your weight in diamonds, you moon over the sea’; and in our sunny Palestinian kitchen, alive with strong, loud, beautiful women rolling vine leaves.”
“The City and the Writer” returns with an interview between series curator Nathalie Handal and Mai Serhan, author of CAIRO: THE UNDELIVERED LETTERS and I CAN IMAGINE IT FOR US.
Read the interview about Serhan’s home village of al-Kabri, and find both of her books available to purchase through Bookshop.org, at the link in our bio. Your purchase supports Words Without Borders and independent bookstores around the country.
If an art form is to flourish, its practitioners must be compensated.
Literary translation has long been undervalued and underpaid, and author incomes have been falling for years. Yet the creativity, expertise, and hard work of writers and translators are essential in granting us access to brilliant world literature in English. As International Booker Prize winner and WWB contributor Michele Hutchison puts it:
“Fair pay is the foundation of sustainable creativity. When translators are compensated justly, we are given the time and mental space required for careful crafting, for capturing nuance and bridging cultural contexts.”
Competitive pay for writers and translators impacts readers, too. When young people give up translation in favor of more stable careers, it means that fewer international authors will reach English-speaking audiences. Literary translation cannot thrive unless writers and translators are sufficiently compensated.
Starting in July, we will offer WWB contributors 15% more for their work. In order to do this, we need to raise $30,000—but we can’t do it without your help.
Invest in fair pay for literary artists by donating today. Head to the link in our bio to contribute.
“It is different . . . a dagger’s leisurely pleasure
plunged into the heart
all the way into one’s childhood
or a lovelorn bullet
preoccupied with your forehead . . .
different from a bomb-torn
body whose meager weight
unsettles the mourners who
carry it.”
In lines stripped of excess yet resounding with loss, Elyas Alavi’s poem “Without Bounty” bears witness to the devastating impact of warfare. Translated from Persian by Sholeh Wolpé.
Find the poem in its English translation and original Persian at the link in our bio.
“We can believe once again that literature is a fist loaded with the future. It sounds utopian, especially for those of us who write in an invisible language and in a world breathing its last—that brutal collision with the outer cosmos, that violent breaking of the line between fiction and reality.”
Through three pieces of vivid surrealist flash nonfiction, Asturian writer Pablo Texón (translated by Will Howard) muses on the roles of the tools, characters, and settings present in his creative process.
Read “A Fist Loaded with the Future: Three Microessays” at the link in our bio—and don’t forget to explore our whole issue of writing from Asturias while you’re reading our digital magazine.
We're hiring an Administrative and Development Assistant (FT)!
The ideal candidate will be a highly organized, systems-oriented self-starter able to prioritize a wide range of tasks. Reporting to the executive director and working closely with the development manager, the assistant will play a crucial role in strengthening Words Without Borders’ administrative capacity at a time of organizational growth. This is an exciting opportunity for an early-career professional looking to gain experience and make an impact at a renowned international literary and educational organization.
Applications close on May 14.
Learn more and apply: https://buff.ly/Vb9ppxy
“As for me, I was born among these hills and it’s here I’ve lived out my ninety-one years.”
Today is Día de les lletres asturianes, or Asturian Literature Day.
In “Our Landscape,” an excerpt from a larger work, Vanessa Gutiérrez weaves medical topographies by the Asturian doctor Jove y Canella, written in the mid-1920s, with oral histories by rural Asturians about living in the region. The excerpt on WWB, translated from Asturian by Scott Emblen-Jarrett, delves into the period in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, 1936 to 1939.
We’re publishing “Our Landscape” as part of our latest issue of Asturian literature, “Every Stone a Seed: Writing from Asturias,” which contains our very first translations from Asturian.
Read the piece, and other pieces from the issue, at the link in our bio.
We're hiring an Engagement Editor (PT)!
Reporting to the marketing and communications manager and working closely with the editorial, digital, development, and education teams, the engagement editor will help develop innovative campaigns and engagement strategies for WWB content and programs and actively interact with our readership and community. This is an exciting opportunity for an early-career digital marketing professional looking to make an impact at a dynamic literary organization.
Applications close on May 14.
Learn more and apply: https://buff.ly/Vb9ppxy
In these three poems, Asturian poet Marta Mori explores the way heartbreak unmoors us from time and place. Translated by Laura Marcos and Daniel García Granda, they’re the latest installment of our issue “Every Stone a Seed: Writing from Asturias.”
For the third poem, “Horizon,” the translators found their individual interpretations so wildly different that they've produced individual versions. You'll see why!
Find their two translations of “Horizon,” as well as their co-translations of “Señardá” and “To Berta, Who Came with Me to the Desert,” at the link in our bio.
