Susan Sontag

Roanne Sharp earned a BA in Comparative Literature from UCLA in 2008 with a focus in English and Spanish post-colonial literature. She first became interested in translating in 2006 while copy-editing a story in UCLA’s student newspaper about Professor Michael Heim, a translator of Milan Kundera and Günter Grass. Professor Heim eventually sponsored her to compete for this award. Roanne has been studying Spanish since age 12 and has worked extensively in rural communities in Latin America with the assistance of the Houston-based non-profit organization Amigos de las Américas. She is the recipient of UCLA’s prestigious Peter Rotter Prize for an essay exploring multiple translations of Pablo Neruda’s Walking Around. In addition, she spent a semester at the University of Delhi where she studied English translations of Hindu devotional poetry. This fall, she will enter the PhD program in Comparative Literature at The University of Texas at Austin.

Juan José Saer’s La mayor (1976) is a collection of short stories that are each so brief that they be termed predecessors to “flash fiction”. The title, translated as The One Before, indicates the obsessively self-reflexive nature of the anthology, which ruminates on issues of memory, causality and the impossibility of a true return from exile through the experience of a handful of recurring characters from the province of Santa Fe where Saer was born.

Juan José Saer, widely regarded as one of Argentina’s greatest contemporary writers, is the author of eleven novels as well as several collections of poetry, essays and short stories. Born in 1937 in the Santa Fe province of Argentina, Saer moved to Paris in the early 1960s and remained in exile until his death in 2005, completing the vast majority of his work abroad. Nevertheless, Saer maintained a distinctly Argentine perspective throughout his writings, returning through fiction to the provincial cites of his youth and the celebrated Argentine wilderness, the pampas. He also used fiction to deal explicitly with his own status as an exiled writer, often focusing on characters who move between the continents of Europe and South America but never truly feel at home in either. In 1987, Saer was awarded Spain’s Nadal Prize for his novel La ocasión. Some of his most critically acclaimed novels, though none of his short stories, have been translated into English, and general interest in Saer’s work has grown since his death in 2005.