On behalf of Green Linden Press, I congratulate Douglas Crockett, who has received the Stephen Mitchell Prize for his translation of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s The Wind of The Moon. Douglas has been awarded $1000, and the book will be published in 2028.
On July 20, 1969, the Apollo XI mission concluded in the Sea of Tranquility, making its commander, Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon. Meanwhile, life in the town of Mágina, Spain, goes on with predictable regularity, as if time had stood still since the dictatorship took control three decades before. When news of the space mission reaches a thirteen-year-old boy, he finds himself at the birth of an exciting new era—and at odds with the expectations and traditions of his family. Antonio Muñoz Molina is unrivaled in his ability to convey the fragile nature of life and how a single moment can forever change it. In the adroit hands of translator Douglas Crockett, The Wind of the Moon demonstrates again his storytelling mastery.
Crockett’s work embodies Stephen Mitchell’s maxim that in translating “there’s a deeper faithfulness than simple accuracy. There’s a place where, as in marriage, faithfulness and freedom are the same things.”
photo: Elena Blanco
Antonio Muñoz Molina was born in Úbeda, Spain in 1956. He has twice been awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura and has also won the Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras, the Prix Fémina Étranger, and the Prix Lire/L’Express Étranger, and the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. His novel Como la sombra que se va was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. A member of the Royal Spanish Academy, he lives in Madrid.
Douglas Crockett was born in 1956 in Munich, Germany, where his father served as a physician for US Army personnel. He spent his childhood in Kingsburg, a small community in California’s agricultural belt. As a teen, he moved with his family to the San Francisco Bay Area. There, Crockett received a scholarship to play basketball at Saint Mary’s College, from which he graduated in 1979. Inspired by a season of basketball at Club Regatas in Mendoza, Argentina, he returned to college and earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and a teaching credential from California State University, Hayward. After studying Legal Interpretation and Translation at The Monterey Institute of International Studies, Crockett has been a freelance interpreter and translator for thirty years. He lives with his wife, Claudia, in Clayton, California, where he teaches and writes.
Congratulations as well to the finalists:
Ross Belot and Sara Burant for their translation of The Immediate Life by Paul Éluard
Rebecca Seiferle for her translation of Human Poems by César Vallejo
I would like to honorably mention several manuscripts that also captivated our attention:
Kurt Beals and Aimee Chor’s translation of So the Day Begins: Grief Refrain by Anja Utler
Alani Hicks-Bartlett’s translation of The Halfway Point by Véronique Tadjo
Jon Cho-Polizzi’s translation of Dodos on the Run: Requiem for a Lost Bestiary by Mikael Vogel
Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Pitas’s translation of Res/ Cow by Claudia Magliano
Hoyoung Moon’s translation of Mutinous Inkblood by Heo Yeon
Eléna Rivera’s translation of The Ink’s Path by Bernard Noël
Marcela Sulak’s translation of Four-Story Woman by Viktorie Rybáková