The National Poetry Series has announced that Marilyn Hacker has been awarded the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Marilyn Hacker's project, King of a Hundred Horsemen, is a translation of French poet Marie Etienne, and will be published in 2008 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Poet Robert Hass served as judge for this year's award.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of eleven books of poems, including Desesperanto (W.W. Norton, 2003) and Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2006), and of seven published books of translations from the French, including She Says by Venus Khoury-Ghata (Graywolf, 2003) and Birds and Bison by Claire Malroux (Sheep Meadow, 2005). Marie Etienne is the author of eight collections of poems, five novels, and two books on the theatre.

The National Poetry Series established the Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007. It will be given annually to a translator who has shown exceptional skill in the translation of contemporary international poetry into English.

Fagles said of the award: 'When you honor the act of translation, you stand to make the act of reading what it is: an enterprise of interaction among different times and different regions of the world itself.'

To buy Marilyn Hacker's Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems click here.