Bio

Alex Zucker began his professional career in 1990, translating the Czech and Slovak wire service for the Czechoslovak News Agency (ČTK) in Prague. Since then, he has translated novels, short stories, plays, essays, reportages, subtitles, poems, song lyrics, art history, philosophy, and an opera. In 2023, he shared the EBRD Literature Prize with Bianca Bellová for his translation of her novel The Lake. In 2010, he won the ALTA National Translation Award for Petra Hůlová’s novel All This Belongs to Me, and previously received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in 2012. He collaborated with Jessica Cohen, Julia Sanches, and Authors Guild staff to produce the AG’s model contract for literary translations in 2021, and, thus far, two surveys of working conditions for literary translators in the U.S. He is a founding member of the Translators Organizing Committee at the National Writers Union.

Project Description

To support the translation of the novel Biography of a Black-and-White Lamb by Tomáš Zmeškal from Czech. Biography of a Black-and-White Lamb (2009), the second novel by Zmeškal (b. 1966), a writer who identifies as Afro-Czech, tells the story of biracial twins Lucie and Václav coming of age in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and '80s. Raised in Prague by their white grandmother after their parents die in a car crash (or so they are told), initially the two siblings are unaware of how their skin color sets them apart from their peers. As they mature, they increasingly run up against the barriers and frustrations of being Black in a nearly all-white society. Zmeškal's mother was a white woman from Czechoslovakia, and his father was a Black man from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.