At an award ceremony held on Thursday, the 4th of August, at the National Eisteddfod in Abergavenny, Glenys M.Roberts was proclaimed the winner of Translation Challenge 2016 and collected her prize money of £250 and a carved staff presented by Cymdeithas Cyfieithwyr Cymru (The Association of Welsh Translators and Interpreters). The task set in this year's competition, organized jointly by Wales PEN Cymru and Wales Literature Exchange, and sponsored by Swansea University's College of Arts and the Humanities, was to translate a poem by Mexican poet Pedro Serrano from Spanish into either English or Welsh. This year's English winner has already been announced at the Hay Festival.

Glenys Roberts was born in Dyffryn Ceiriog and grew up in Anglesey. She graduated in Welsh from Aberystwyth University and has been living since 1970 in Glamorgan with her husband Guto, working as a teacher and later for the Welsh Joint Education Committee before branching out as a freelance translator and editor. For many years she was on the management board of Cymdeithas Cyfieithwyr Cymru and a member of its examining board. In 2010 she was the crowned bard at the Blaenau Gwent National Eisteddfod and carries the bardic name Glenys Mair. She has three children and four (soon to become five) grandchildren. In recent years she has been learning Spanish and in his adjudication Ned Thomas praised her grasp of the syntactic resources of the Welsh language and her consequent ability to render the original text into natural-sounding and idiomatic Welsh.

"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. Professor Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones, Director 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."