14/09/2026
A Whale Is a Country Wins the Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation 2026!
We are delighted to announce that A Whale Is a Country by Mexican poet Isabel Zapata, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers, is the winner of the Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation 2026.
Poet and translator Mona Kareem, the chair of this year’s judging panel, praised the winning book, saying, “In A Whale is a Country, Isabel Zapata revives a lost intimacy between human and non-human animals. Genre-defying, something between science and journalism, shape-shifting in Robin Myers' translation.”
Isabel Zapata’s formally inventive book brings together poems in many shapes and sizes: odes, prose poems, list poems, scientific reports, and even a short dictionary. The creative challenges presented by this variety, which mirrors the diversity of the natural world, inspired a daring and equally inventive translation from Robin Myers.
The winning poet Isabel Zapata said:
“I was trying to write a poem for my niece who had just been born when I began writing this book. I was trying to tell her a story about the whales, and then it just grew so much, this project became such a big thing in my life, and it has given me many happy moments.
“I think that this book belongs to a very urgent conversation that we all should be having about our relationship to the world and to the creatures that we share it with. I feel that this book is in debt to a lot of other books and a lot of other authors that have touched upon these topics. So, I hope the book adds to that conversation.”
Upon receiving the award, translator Robin Myers said:
“I am so happy and honored at this incredible surprise. It is a joy and an honor in itself to translate Isabel's work, which I've had the privilege of doing with this book and several other of her works as well. She's a writer I admire and a person I adore.
“The Sarah Maguire Award is something very special in the ecosystem of literary translation, and I'm very, very grateful to the Poetry Translation Centre for all the work you do for poetry and translation, and to the incredible judges who I admire so much individually for their advocacy for poetry and translation.”
The judges this year were André Naffis-Sahely, Leo Boix, and Mona Kareem. Naffis-Sahely is a poet, translator, and editor whose recent work includes The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin Books, 2017). Boix is a poet and translator, author of the acclaimed Southernmost Sonnets (Chatto, London, 2025). Kareem is a poet and scholar who has authored four collections, including I Will Not Fold These Maps (Poetry Translation Center, London 2023).
The Sarah Maguire Prize, launched in 2020 and awarded this year for the fourth time, seeks to honour poets and translators alike and recognise translation as an essential creative art. The winning poet and their translator will share an award of £3000.
Judge Leo Boix said of the winning book:
“A luminous and deeply thoughtful book on ecology and our relationship with the natural world, where animals take centre stage. Isabel Zapata invites us to see the living world anew through poems that are both intimate and expansive. Robin Myers’s translation captures with remarkable precision the clarity, curiosity, and quiet power of Zapata’s voice.”
A Whale Is a Country was published by Fonograf Editions in the USA in March 2024, edited by Jeff Alessandrelli. Fonograf Editions is a nonprofit press and literary record label based in Portland, Oregon. They value the interdisciplinary, experimental, and unclassifiable. Both Zapata and Myers thanked their publisher. Zapata commented: “To publish any book is very difficult because it involves so much work from so many different people in the book ecosystem, but when it is poetry it is even more so, and when it is poetry in translation it is three times as hard… it is always a small miracle for a book to exist.”
You can read more about the environmental themes of the winning book on the PTC blog here: Wonder Amid Extinction by Jeff Alessandrelli, Editor, Co-Publisher, Fonograf Editions.
