The winners and highly commended entrants in this year’s Anthea Bell Prize have now been announced. Many congratulations to them all.
2026 marked the sixth year of the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators, the Queen’s Translation Exchange’s national languages competition for secondary school students aged 11 to 18.
This year, a record number of students participated in the Prize, with over 25,000 students from more than 500 schools taking part across the UK. The Translation Exchange received over 5,400 of the participating schools’ best entries, which were judged by a panel of professional literary translators and Oxford Modern Languages students.
This year’s competition texts included extracts of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in all six languages – from passages by Olympe de Gouges, Cesare Pavese, Marcel Proust, and Leo Tolstoy to the experimental poetry of Chilean writer Gonzalo Roja, the realist stories of Tibetan writer Pema Tseden, and the Young Adult novels of Gina Mayer.
Dr Charlotte Ryland, Founding Director of the Queen’s Translation Exchange and Supernumerary Fellow at Queen’s, said:
The Anthea Bell Prize is a rare example of growth in languages across the UK, and a great cause for optimism. Young people and their teachers are opting enthusiastically for an approach to language learning that prioritises creativity, culture, and critical thinking. At the Translation Exchange we are more motivated than ever to increase these opportunities for young people, in particular through collaboration with other universities, and we look forward to developing further cross-sector partnerships in the coming year.
Dr Elly Walters, who coordinates the Prize, added:
We have been delighted by the response to this year’s Prize and by the exceptionally high standard of entries, as remarked by our judges. The creativity shown by students has been especially impressive, from rhyming and alliterative poetry translations to stop-motion video entries. It has also been wonderful to hear how teachers have celebrated their students’ successes in schools, coming up with their own awards for the most poetic, most daring, most innovative entries. We’d like to extend our sincere congratulations to all who took part.
The Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators was launched by the Queen’s Translation Exchange in 2020, inspired by the life and work of the great translator Anthea Bell. It aims to promote language learning across the UK and to inspire creativity in the classroom. By providing teachers with the tools they need to bring translation to life, the initiative motivates more pupils to study languages throughout their time at school and beyond.
Teachers can register here for updates about the Anthea Bell Prize 2026-27, which will launch on Friday 18 September 2026.
