The Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts

Special Guest Wendy Call

“Sam Simon’s translation of Begoña Ugalde Pascual’s short story “General Cemetery” does lovely justice to the original, bringing the work’s tonal and temporal tautness into English. The narrator’s humor translates elegantly—which is no small task—as does the story’s terrifying undercurrent about Chile’s military dictatorship, more than a generation after its end. Ugalde Pascual’s prose is both confident and lyric (evidence of her work as a poet and playwright, as well) and Simon conveys both qualities in their translation. I am grateful to be introduced to this Chilean author and look forward to reading more of her work in English, thanks to Sam Simon.”

Wendy Call (she/her) is co-editor of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide (Penguin, 2007) and the forthcoming Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum, 2024) and author of the award-winning nonfiction book No Word for Welcome (Nebraska, 2011). She is also translator of two collections of poetry by Mexican-Zapotec poet Irma Pineda: In the Belly of Night and Other Poems (Pluralia/Eulalia, 2022) and Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater (Deep Vellum, 2023) and has published more than 100 English translations of Pineda’s poems in literary journals, including Chicago Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry, and World Literature Today. Together with Pineda, she won the 2022 John Frederick Nims Prize in Translation from the Poetry Foundation. Wendy’s literary projects have been supported by Artist Trust, the Fulbright Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She serves on the creative nonfiction faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program and will be the Fall 2023 Distinguished Writer in Residence at Cornell College and Translator in Residence at the University of Iowa. She lives in Southeast Seattle, on Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca, Mexico, on Mixtec and Zapotec land.