2025 NIF Translation Fellowships to translate texts from 10 Indian languages open for applications

The third edition of the New India Foundation’s Translation Fellowships is accepting applications till December 31, 2025. The fellowships will be awarded across ten languages for translating non-fiction texts published from 1850 onwards. Each fellow will receive a grant of Rs 6 lakhs over a period of six months.

The languages in consideration for this year’s fellowship are Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil, and Urdu. The jury for these fellowships this year includes the NIF Trustees: political scientist Niraja Jayal Gopal, historian Srinath Raghavan, partner trilegal Rahul Matthan, and entrepreneur Manish Sabharwal, alongside the Language Expert Committee in all ten languages, comprising scholars, professors, academics and literary translators. Fellows are expected to publish the translated works, which will be an extension of their winning proposals.

The New India Foundation’s focus on translating historical texts from Indian languages into English hopes to create an expansive cultural reach for works which have thus far been confined to one language. The Fellowship has no constraints regarding the genre or style of the original text, the translator’s nationality, or the material’s ideology.

Interested translators can apply here.

The previous edition’s winners are:

• Tamil: Vilasini Ramani, to translate Swaraj to Whom? by Malayapuram Singaravelar

• Gujarati: Hemang Ashwinkumar, to translate The Dawn of Life by Prabhudas Gandhi

• Urdu: Matthew Reeck,...

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