Winners of Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators announced

The Queen’s College Translation Exchange is delighted to announce the 2024 winners of the Anthea Bell Prize. The winners are listed here. Congratulations to them all and thank you to everyone who took part!

The Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators is a creative translation competition for students aged 11-18 run by the Translation Exchange at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. The competition is inspired by the work of the translator Anthea Bell OBE (1936–2018), one of the finest and most influential literary translators of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The competition runs from five languages – French, German, Italian, Mandarin, Spanish – into English and from French into Welsh. It runs across 10 geographical areas of the UK, with area winners and commendations selected from each area across four levels for each language, and UK-wide winners and runners-up. In 2024-2025, Russian will be added to the list of languages included in the competition. 

Prize co-ordinator Dr Holly Langstaff said:

We were delighted to learn that over 16,000 students from across the UK participated in the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators in 2024.

We set a wide array of challenging texts for the competition task this year and our judges were impressed by the imaginative and convincing translations submitted from schools in all areas of the UK.

Thank you to all teachers and students for helping to make this fourth year of the prize another resounding success – and congratulations to all involved. 

Thank you to our sponsors at Pushkin Press who donated the book prizes for the winning students.