The 2013 Popescu Prize (formerly the European Poetry Translation Prize) opens for entries on 1 July 2013.



The Prize

"Marooned on our island of language, the Popescu is one of the few regular supply ships.”
– Sasha Dugdale, Editor, Modern Poetry in Translation, and a former Popescu Prize judge

The Popescu Prize has been awarded biennially by the Poetry Society for a volume of poetry translated from a European language into English.

Formerly the European Poetry Translation Prize (1983-1997) the Prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in memory of the young Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977, aged 19. Popescu translated the work of one of Romania's leading poets, Mihai Eminescu, into English. The Prize’s founding sponsor was Romanian journalist, author and democracy campaigner Ion Ratiu. The prize, awarded to a translator, was supported by The Ratiu Foundation from 2003 to 2011.


The Schedule

The opening date for the 2013 Popescu Prize is 1 July. The closing date for submissions is 31 July. The winner will be announced in winter 2013. For full details email the Poetry Society marketing department.

The Corneliu M Popescu Prize 2013:
Make a Submission

The Poetry Society invites submissions for the 2013 Corneliu M Popescu Prize for Poetry in Translation. Publishers, poets or translators wishing to submit to the prize should be aware:

A prize of £1000 will be awarded to the translator of a volume of poetry translated from a European language into English and published between 1 June 2011 and 30 June 2013.
The closing date for submissions is 31 July 2013.
Three copies of each book should be sent to Corneliu M Popescu Prize, The Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London, WC2H 9BX, UK. Each submission must be accompanied by an entry form.
Submissions can be made by the publisher, translator or poet. Self-published work is ineligible.
By submitting a volume, the copyright holder grants the Poetry Society the unrestricted non-exclusive right to perform/broadcast/publish one poem from the volume, when the winner is announced or up to twelve months afterwards, in order to publicise the winning entry.
The winner will be announced in the winter on the Poetry Society website.
The judges’ decision will be final.

Before contacting us with any questions please make sure they haven't already been answered in our FAQs section.



2013 Judges

Karen Leeder is Professor of Modern German Literature and Fellow and Tutor in German at New College, Oxford. She has translated work by a number of contemporary German poets including Raoul Schrott, Durs Grünbein, Uljana Wolf, Ulrike Almut Sandig and Volker Braun. Her translation of Evelyn Schlag’s Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2004) won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2005 and her translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Fatal Numbers: Why Count on Chance? (Upper West Side Philosophers’ Press, 2011), was shortlisted for the US National Book Critics’ Circle Award. In 2014 her translations of Michael Krüger, The Eleventh Commandment: Selected Poems, will appear with Sheep Meadow Press.

David Wheatley is a poet and critic with particular research interests in the field of twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, Irish literature and Samuel Beckett. He has published four collections of poetry with Gallery Press: Thirst (1997; Rooney Prize for Irish Literature), Misery Hill (2000), Mocker (2006), and A Nest on the Waves (2010). He has also edited the Poems of James Clarence Mangan for Gallery Press (2003) and Samuel Beckett’s Selected Poems 1930-1989 for Faber (2009). His work features in various anthologies, including After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (Faber/FSG, 1994), The New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2004), Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010), An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry (Harvard UP, 2010), and The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (2010). He was a founding editor of the poetry journal Metre, and has written on poetry for a variety of other journals including London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, New Statesman, Essays in Criticism, Times Higher Education Supplement, The Irish Times and Poetry Review.

(http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/popescu/)