The Book of Things by Aleš Šteger, translated by Brian Henry, and published by BOA in 2010, has been awarded the Best Translated Book Award in Poetry. Organized by Three Percent at the University of Rochester, the Best Translated Book Award is the only prize of its kind to honor the best original works of international literature and poetry published in the U.S. over the previous year. The ceremony was held on Friday, April 29 at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. This year, for the first time, the event was held in collaboration with the PEN World Voices Festival. Thanks to the support of Amazon.com, the awards also came with $5,000 cash prizes for each winning author and translator. From the time Aleš Šteger’s first book of poems, Chessboards of Hours, was published in 1995 at age 22, he has been considered one of Slovenia’s most promising poets. That promise has been unleashed over the course of a decade and a half, through three more books of poetry, a fictional travelogue in Peru, and a collection of lyric essays which received an award for being the best book of essays written in Slovenian. Aleš Šteger says that he is “Extremely happy” to have The Book of Things win the Best Translated Book Award in Poetry, which he feels, “is a sign of raising interest for the cultural space these poems grew out of." BOA’s translation series is funded by the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Recognizing that it is impossible to have a great translation without having a great translator, one of the judges noted, “translator Brian Henry (himself a poet of significant talent) renders these poems beautifully into an English that is both colloquial and disconcertingly plainspoken.” On behalf of the whole BOA family, we applaud Aleš Šteger and translator by Brian Henry on this well-deserved recognition!  [caption id="attachment_998" align="aligncenter" width="157" caption="BOA poet Ales Steger. Photo by Joze Suhadolnik."][/caption]