The National Endowment for the Arts announced that MLL PhD candidate Brad Harmon is one of 22 translators selected to receive a Literature Translation Fellowship. This fellowship will support the translation of the novel Who Killed Bambi? by Monika Fagerholm from Swedish into English. In total, the NEA will award $325,000 in grants to support the translation into English of works written in 17 different languages from 21 countries.
NEA Director of Literary Arts Amy Stolls said, “The National Endowment for the Arts’ continued investment in contemporary translators preserves, strengthens, and advances our nation’s rich literary traditions. This new group of fellows is the latest in a longstanding legacy of support for translators of poetry and prose who—through the beauty and power of their words—inspire us, challenge us, and open our eyes to the important voices from countries around the world.”
Who Killed Bambi? is a short, kaleidoscopic novel that follows the fallout of a gang rape committed by a group of wealthy teenage boys from Villastan, a fictional suburb of Helsinki. Nearly a decade after the violent incident, the silence that has kept the town in its grip begins to unravel with the news of a resident planning a film about the crime called Who Killed Bambi? Written in her signature winding postmodernist prose, Fagerholm’s Who Killed Bambi? has been translated into a dozen languages and counting, won the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and has been adapted for the stage. Critically acclaimed and widely translated, Fagerholm (b. 1961) is one of the most innovative fiction writers in contemporary Nordic literature.
Brad Harmon is a translator and scholar of Nordic and German literature, and an aspiring essayist. His translations have appeared in venues ranging from Poetry, Denver Quarterly, and Circumference to The White Review, Swedish Book Review, and Best Literary Translations 2025. His debut book of literary translation, Katarina Frostenson’s poetry collection The Space of Time, appeared in November 2024 (Threadsuns Press). A first-generation college student, he earned a BA in German, Scandinavian and Dutch at the University of Minnesota, an MA in Scandinavian Literature from the University of Washington, and is currently completing a PhD dissertation on the ecopoetics of the body in German, Swedish, and Danish poetry at Johns Hopkins University. He has been an Emerging Translator Mentee with both the American Literary Translators Association (Swedish) and the British National Centre for Writing (Faroese), an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellow to Sweden, and a Fulbright fellow to Germany.
Finnish author Monika Fagerholm (b. 1961) is one of the most renowned living authors in the Nordic countries, particularly acclaimed for her polyvocal prose that experiments with form and genre to dissect the complex, often contradictory layers of modern human sociality. Debuting in 1987, Fagerholm’s breakthrough was with the 1994 novel Wonderful Women by the Sea, whose English translation by Joan Tate was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Among her many awards are Sweden’s August Prize for The American Girl (2005)and the Nordic Council Literature Prize for Who Killed Bambi? (2019).Fagerholm herself received the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize in 2016 and the Selma Lagerlöf Prize in 2020. Several of Fagerholm’s novels have been adapted for film, television, or the stage.
Since 1981, the NEA has awarded more than 600 fellowships to 538 literary translators, with translations representing 82 languages and 93 countries. Visit arts.gov to browse bios and project descriptions from all of the 2025 recipients and past Literature Translation Fellows.
