Keeping Me Busy: The Sophie Castille Awards – US Edition 2026

The proverbial cat is out of the bag now. I’m helping out Heidi McDonald over at The Beat by being the Administrator of the U.S. edition of the Sophie Castille Awards. The Beat is sponsoring the awards this year.

This is the annual award given to the translator whose work best presents foreign material in the English language. (There are other versions of the awards covering eight other languages, also!)

Castille was the international rights director and V.P. of licensing for Mediatoon, which would be impressive enough. On top of that, she was a cofounder and director of Europe Comics, without which I’m not completely sure PipelineComics.com would exist today. One of the reasons I was able to read and review so many books in the late 2010s had to do with the existence of Europe Comics and their tireless work in getting books translated and, ultimately, licensed to foreign publishers.

For the awards, I’ll be shuffling the paperwork, cracking the whip on the judges, and hopefully being the person who helps all this run as smoothly as possible. It’s the first year that we’re doing this, so it’s a lot of piecing bits and pieces together and creating the framework that makes it all possible. Thankfully, we have inspiration from previous hosts of the awards, including the folks in England over at the Lakes International Comics Art Festival, who handled it in previous years.

With any luck, we’ll learn a lot of lessons, establish a solid footing, and run it even bigger and better next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, etc.

We’ll be handing out the final award(s) at the New York Comic Con in October, which is very exciting. This may be just the excuse I needed to finally return to that show…

If you are a translator or a publisher and have books you’d like to submit, leave me a comment or drop me a line. We’re reaching out to as many of you as we can, but the comics industry is surprisingly vast and there’s a giant game of musical chairs across publishers. I’m sure some of my emails are going to be bouncing back to me.