2022 Chowdhury Prize in Literature Winner: Christos Ikonomou

On Wednesday April 20 at 3:30 PM, the Greek short story writer Christos Ikonomou was presented with the inaugural Chowdhury Prize in Literature. The English Department hosted both Ikonomou and his American translator Karen Emmerich for the award event, which included a discussion focused on writing and activism, and the relationship of the writer and the translator.

CHRISTOS IKONOMOU was born in Athens in 1970. He has published four collections of short stories, The Woman on the Rails (2003), Something Will Happen, You’ll See (2010), and Good Will Come From The Sea (2014) and The Volcano Daughters (2017). Something Will Happen, You’ll See won Greece’s prestigious Best Short-Story Collection State Award and became the most reviewed Greek book of 2011. His work has been translated into seven languages.

KAREN EMMERICH is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, and a translator of modern Greek poetry and prose. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2010, after previously earning an MA in Comparative Literature from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her fields of specialization are modern Greek literature, translation studies, and textual scholarship. Her monograph Literary Translation and the Making of Originals was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017; her translations include books by Christos Ikonomou, Amanda Michalopoulou, Yannis Ritsos, Miltos Sachtouris, Ersi Sotiropoulou, Eleni Vakalo and others.