Aron Aji, director of DWLLC's MFA in Literary Translation Program, wins NEA Literature Translation Fellowship

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Aron Aji
Aron Aji

University of Iowa Professor Aron Aji has been awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Translation Fellowship to support his translation from Turkish of My Heart’s East, a collection of poems by Murathan Mungan.

Aji is the director of the MFA in Literary Translation Program in the Division of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures, part of the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. He was also the recipient of a previous NEA Literature Translation Fellowship in 2006 and received a National Translation Award in 2004.

The translation of My Heart's East will be the first book-length collection of Mungan’s poetry to appear in English. Aji will collaborate on the project with David Gramling, a translator and faculty member at the University of Arizona.

The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.