On Saturday, 28th of May, Jessica Cortes-Allsopp from Twickenham collected her prize money of £250 at the Translation Challenge award ceremony held during the Hay Festival. This year the competition, organized jointly by Wales PEN Cymru and Wales Literature Exchange, and sponsored by Swansea University’s College of Arts and Humanities, was to translate a poem by Mexican poet Pedro Serrano from Spanish into either English or Welsh.

Jessica, who is 24 and a recent graduate in French and Italian, is this year's English-language winner. She has a one-year old daughter and in September will start on a Masters' course in translation at University College London which she hopes will lead to a career in translation.The winner for translation into Welsh will be announced in August at a parallel ceremony held during National Eisteddfod week in Abergavenny.

In his adjudication Richard Gwyn, writer, academic and world-traveller, praised Jessica's "tight and accurate translation, consistently reproducing the complexities of Serrano’s language better than other entrants, and maintaining a rhythm that measures up against that of the original." From a large field of entrants he also singled out Iona Mcintyre, Sara Naylor and Lesley Lawn "for their proficient and, in different ways, risk-taking, musical and imaginative variations on Serrano’s original theme."

"Translation is fundamental to the free circulation of ideas between cultures and is therefore a key priority for an international writers' organization like our own" said Sally Baker, Director of Wales PEN Cymru. Ned Thomas, President of the Mercator Institute which houses Wales Literature Exchange and the EU-funded Literature Across Frontiers Programme added: "the development of high-level translation skills is essential to the process of literary exchange which we exist to promote."