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Donald Nicholson-Smith is a translator and freelance editor. Born in Manchester, England, he is a long-time resident of New York City. His translations include works by Thierry Jonquet, Guy Debord, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Guillaume Apollinaire, Raoul Vaneigem, Antonin Artaud, Yasmina Khadra (with Alyson Waters), Jean-Patrick Manchette, and Serge Pey. He won the 2015 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translation of Manchette’s The Mad and the Bad. His translation of Abdellatif Laâbi’s In Praise of Defeat, including self-selected poems from the Moroccan author and dissident’s long career, was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. Nicholson-Smith has been dubbed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of his services to French literature in translation.

In Praise of Defeat 2017 Shortlist

Judges’ Citation

In this bilingual book (Laâbi’s original French and Nicolson-Smith’s English) – a book that is monumental both in size (over 800 pages) and in scope – we meet one of the major poets of our time, one who has lived through great and catastrophic events and responded to them with a passionate intelligent humanity.


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