Drenka Willen is the first recipient of the James H. Ottaway Jr. Award for the Promotion of International Literature, which is named in honor of the first chair of Words Without Borders and recognizes "an individual whose work and activism has supported the mission of Words Without Borders of promoting cultural understanding through the publication and promotion of international literature." The award will be presented at Words Without Borders' 10th anniversary gala on October 29.
Willen joined Harcourt as a translator and freelance editor in the 1960s and has been "a tireless advocate for literature in translation for close to 50 years," Words Without Borders said. Among the authors and translators she has worked with are Nobel laureates Günter Grass, Octavio Paz, José Saramago and Wisława Szymborska, as well as Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Stanisław Lem, Ryszard Kapuściński, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, William Weaver, Edith Grossman, Margaret Jull Costa, Krishna Winston, Clare Cavanagh and Geoffrey Brock.
"I am thrilled that Drenka has been chosen as the first recipient of the Ottaway," said Alane Salierno Mason, founder of Words Without Borders and v-p and executive editor at Norton. "I was fortunate to work in Drenka's ambit at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich early in my career, and to some degree it was a sense of homesickness for the world she fostered that led me to start Words Without Borders."