The Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation (awarded every other year) is organised by Poetry Society and sponsored by Ratiu Foundation. The first Award was given in 1983. The prize is £1,500 and the competition is open to collections of poetry translated from a European language into English. The prize is awarded to the translator.

This year’s prize will begin accepting submissions from mid-February. Full details about the application process to be announced soon by the Poetry Society and the Ratiu Foundation.

Check this site and www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/popescu soon. In the meantime, the Poetry Society is delighted to announce the judges for this year's prize: Jane Draycott was nominated as a Next Generation poet, and is a previous winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. Her new translation of the medieval dream-elegy ‘Pearl’, an extract from which was a Stephen Spender Prize-winner 2008, is published this year by Carcanet/OxfordPoets. Her collections include ‘The Night Tree’ and ‘Prince Rupert’s Drop’ (OxfordPoets) and ‘Tideway’ and ‘Christina the Astonishing’ (with Lesley Saunders) from Two Rivers Press. Her most recent collection ‘Over’ was shortlisted for the 2009 TS Eliot Prize. She teaches at the University of Oxford and Lancaster University. Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. She worked for the British Council in Russia in the 1990s where she set up the Russian New Writing Project with the Royal Court Theatre. Since her return in 2001 she has translated new plays for the Court, the RSC and other theatre companies. She has published two collections of translations of Russian poetry. The most recent, ‘Birdsong on the Seabed’, (Bloodaxe) by Elena Shvarts was a PBS choice and shortlisted for the Popescu and Academica Rossica Translation Awards. A third collection of her own poems, ‘The Red House’, is published by Carcanet in August 2011. Previous winners of the Corneliu M Popescu Prize include Randall Couch’s translation of ‘Madwomen’ by Gabriela Mistral (in 2009), ‘Drums of Silence’ by Kristiina Ehin, translated by Ilmar Lehtpere (in 2007), ‘The Bridge’ by Marin Sorescu, translated by Adam J Sorkin and Lidia Vianu (in 2005), and David Constantine’s translation of ‘Lighter than Air’ by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (in 2003). The Prize is named after Corneliu M Popescu, translator of the work of one of Romania’s leading poets, Mihai Eminescu, into English. Popescu was killed in the violent earthquake of 4 March 1977, aged 19. The Prize was initiated in the early 1980s by Ion Ratiu, the well known Romanian politician, businessman, philanthropist, champion of democracy, and supporter of the arts. Details of this year’s competition were announced on 17 January 2011, the eleventh commemoration of his passing away. You can see a video of the 2009 Award Ceremony here.