On March 31, PEN America announced it's 2026 literary prize winners. The Translation Prize, for a book-length translation of prose from any language into English, was awarded to Minna Zallman Proctor for her translation of The Leucothea Dialogues by Cesare Pavese. Published last fall by Archipelago Books, a NYRB distributed press, The Leucothea Dialogues is a shifting, primordial work by Cesare Pavese, plumbing the netherworlds of philosophy, myth, human feeling, and mortality.
“Minna Zallman Proctor’s vigorous retranslation from Italian of Cesare Pavese’s singular yet multiplicitous The Leucothea Dialogues stands out from a superb shortlist as a brilliant meditation on, as well as in, translation... [Proctor] makes the book come alive for readers today. Her introduction is especially remarkable for soaring beyond the usual necessary context about author and book into its own mythological register." — PEN Translation Prize Judges