The John Florio Prize for Italian translation is awarded by the

Society of Authors The Society of Authors (SoA) is a United Kingdom trade union for professional writers, illustrators and literary translators, founded in 1884 to protect the rights and further the interests of authors. Membership of the society is open to "anyon ...

, with the co-sponsorship of the Italian Cultural Institute and Arts Council England. Named after the Tudor Anglo-Italian writer-translator

John Florio Giovanni Florio (1552 or 1553 – 1625), known as John Florio, was an English linguist, poet, writer, translator, lexicographer, and royal language tutor at the Court of James I. He is recognised as the most important Renaissance humanist in ...

, the prize was established in 1963. As of 1980 it is awarded biannually for the best English translation of a full-length work of literary merit and general interest from Italian.

Winners and shortlistees

1960–1979 annual run

1980–2004 biennial winners

2006–present biennial winners, runners-up, and shortlisted works

= winner

2024 judges

Maame Blue

Maame Blue is a creative writing tutor and author of the novel Bad Love, which won the 2021 Betty Trask award. Her short stories have been published in three anthologies and her writing has appeared in Writers Mosaic, Refinery29 and The Author Magazine. Her second novel The Rest Of You will be published by Amistad (US) and Verve Books (UK) in Autumn 2024.

Jamie McKendrick

Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. He is the author of six collections of poetry, including ''The Marble Fly,'' winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a Poetry Book Society Choice; ''Ink Stone'', shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award; and ''Crocodiles & Obelisks'', shortlisted for the Forward Prize. ''Out There'' won the Hawthornden Prize. An earlier selection of his poems was published as ''Sky Nails,'' and he is editor of ''20th-Century Italian Poems''. ''The Embrace,'' his translations of Valerio Magrelli’s poetry, won the Oxford-Weidenfeld and the John Florio prizes.

Sandra Silipo

Sandra Silipo has been studying and working with languages for over 30 years. She has a BA in Classics, an MA in Translation and an MA in Applied Linguistics. She has worked for the language industry in a variety of roles: as an associate lecturer and author for the Open University, as a free-lance translator, as a principal examiner for the IBO, as a language teacher and as a teachers’ trainer. Her profession has taught her that every word and every language tells a story. She loves to spend her time listening to those stories, and retelling them.

References

{{reflist Awards established in 1963 Translation awards Society of Authors awards