Excellence Grants 2025
Austėja Merkevičiūtė, Vilnius, Lithuania
Excellence Grants 2025
Looren Excellence Grant 2025
German, Persian > Lithuanian
Austėja Merkevičiūtė is a literary translator from German and Persian into Lithuanian. She has also worked as an actor and an editor alongside her translation career. She has translated works by Stefan Zweig and Elias Canetti, among others, and non-fiction by Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, Viktor Frankl and Alfred Adler. In recent years, she has also translated poetry by Ali Abdollahi, Sohrab Sepehri and Shokoofer Azar from Persian. Austėja Merkevičiūtė was awarded a Looren Excellence Grant to work on Gerhard Meier’s Amrainer Tetralogie.
Sergej Moreino, Riga, Latvia
Excellence Grants 2025
Looren Excellence Grant 2025
German, Polish > Latvian
German, Polish, Latvian > Russian
Sergej Moreino is a writer and translator of poetry, prose, essays and literary criticism. He translates from German, Polish and Latvian into Russian, and from German and Russian into Latvian. He also runs translation workshops and works as an editor. He has translated many German-language poets, including Johannes Bobrowski, Eberhard Häfner, Ulf Stolterfoht, Klaus Merz, Mariella Mehr, alongside Polish poets and prose writers such as Roman Honet, Wojciech Pestka, Bruno Schulz and Czesław Miłosz. He was awarded a 2025 excellence grant for his translation of Kurt Marti’s poetry collection Hannis Äpfel into Latvian and Russian for a trilingual edition.
Thi Tuoi Nguyen, Hanoi, Vietnam
Excellence Grants 2025
Regula Renschler Excellence Grant 2025
French > Vietnamese
Thi Tuoi Nguyen works as a literary translator from French to Vietnamese. Her publications include titles by Hector Malot, Georges Simenon, Laurence Devillairs, Olivier Norek and Amélie Nothomb. At Translation House Looren, she will be working on Joël Dicker’s Un animal sauvage, for which she has been awarded a Regula Renschler Excellence Grant.
Sandra Tamele, Maputo, Mozambique
Excellence Grants 2025
Looren Excellence Grant 2025
Italian, English > Portuguese
Portuguese > English
Sandra Tamele is a literary translator from English and Italian into (Mozambican) Portuguese. Alongside her translation work, she heads the publishing house Editora Trinta Zero Nove in Maputo. She has translated writing by Wole Soyinka, Makena Onejrika, Yara Nakahanda Monteiro and Niccolò Amaniti. Sandra Tamele was awarded a Looren Excellence Grant to translate Sabina Zanini’s A una voce from Italian into Portuguese.
Tess Lewis, New York, USA
Excellence Grants 2025
Max Geilinger Excellence Grant
German, French > English
Tess Lewis is a New York-based writer and translator from French and German into English. She has translated writing by Walter Benjamin, Jonas Lüscher, Klaus Merz, Lutz Seiler, Anne Weber, Montaigne and Philippe Jaccottet. She is a former Guggenheim fellow, was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and a Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris. Tess Lewis is an advisory editor for The Hudson Review and has curated several editions of New York’s Festival Neue Literatur for German literature published in English. At Translation House Looren, she will be working on Judith Keller’s novel Wilde Manöver.