The Fund and Its Mechanics
The PEN/Heim Translation Fund was established with a gift from the Heim family in honor of Michael Henry Heim, the UCLA translator whose work spanned Czech, Russian, German, and Romanian. Grants run from $2,000 to $4,000 and support works of fiction, poetry, drama, and literary nonfiction not yet contracted with a publisher — that eligibility restriction is deliberate: the grant is meant to help a translator bring a work to a publishable state, not to reward a deal already made. Applicants must be translating into English; they need not be American citizens, and the source language carries no geographic restriction.
Applications are reviewed by a rotating panel of translators, editors, and writers. PEN America administers the fund and opens a single annual call, typically in the first quarter of the year, with awards announced in spring. The panel selects between ten and twenty-five grants per cycle, and the full list of recipients is published on the PEN America site alongside the translators' statements describing each project.
Russian Titles the Fund Has Reached
Russian-language literature has appeared on the grant list across multiple cycles. Among the funded projects, Sasha Dugdale received support for her translation of Maria Stepanova's verse and prose — work that contributed to the broader visibility of Stepanova's writing in English before In Memory of Memory found its publisher. The fund has also supported translations of poetry by Linor Goralik and prose by Ludmila Petrushevskaya, both writers whose formal and tonal range creates significant translation difficulty.
Because the grant requires the work to be unsolicited and unpublished in English at the time of application, the list functions as an early indicator of what translators consider urgent — which Russian writers are being worked on before publishers have committed. Several funded projects have subsequently reached commercial publication; others remain in progress or have moved to small-press release.
The fund does not specify a quota by language, and Russian competes with Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, and dozens of others in each cycle. In years following February 2022, the number of Russian-to-English projects in the applicant pool is not publicly reported, but the program's open eligibility means translators working with writers now publishing in exile — through presses such as Freedom Letters — remain as eligible as those working on historical texts.
For translators working with living Russian writers whose legal status in Russia has changed since 2022, the pre-contract requirement makes PEN/Heim one of the few institutional funding routes available before a project has found commercial support.
