Image: Society of Authors, Natalie Thorpe
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Eight Prizes Awarded for Translation and Editing
A year ago, we were reporting on The Great British Sasakawa Foundation Prize—at that point not yet awarded but being added to the portfolio of honors administered in the United Kingdom’s Society of Authors’ Translation Prizes—that accolade has been presented now to its first winner in this year’s laureates of the program.
Eight prizes with an aggregate payout of £28,000 (US$35,319) were given Wednesday (February 7) to nine literary translators and one editor.
Publishing Perspectives readers will recall that the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation is one of the eight honors in this basket, and always prefers to announce its winner itself, well before the others are announced by the society. You’ll find our story from January 9 here, announcing Luke Leafgren to be the winner this year for his translation of Mister N by Najwa Barakat, published by England’s press called And Other Stories.
The Translation Prizes are sponsored by Amazon Literary Partnership and Hawthornden Foundation.
The 2024 Translation Prize Winners
There’s some change in the list of each year’s awards─some being biennial─and this year’s list is:
- New: The Great British Sasakawa Foundation Prize for translation from Japanese
- The TA First Translation Prize for debut translation from any language
- The Goethe-Institut Award
- The Premio Valle Inclán for translation from Spanish
- The Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translation from German
- The Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation from French
- The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Translation from Arabic
The Great British Sasakawa Foundation Prize
The award gives £3,000 (US$3,784) to its winner and £1,000 to a runner-up, for translation of a full-length work originally written in Japanese.
- Alison Watts is the inaugural winner of this prize, for her translation of The Boy and the Dog by Seishu Hase (Simon & Schuster, Scribner).
Jurors: Nozomi Abe, Nick Bradley and Maya Jaggi. Watts is credited on the cover of the book.
TA First Translation Prize
This is the honor with an award of £3,000 / US$3,784 and a runner-up prize of £1,000 / US$1,251 for a debut literary translation into English and published in the United Kingdom.
It’s always of special interest for Publishing Perspectives readers because it’s one of the program s started with seed money from the highly regarded author and translator Daniel Hahn. Sponsored by Hahn and the British Council, this is the one that has the special grace to recognize both translator and editor.
- Sophie Collins and editor Marigold Atkey are the winners for a translation from Dutch of The Opposite of a Person by Lieke Marsman (Daunt Books).
Jurors: Will Forrester, Carolina Orloff and Mui Poopoksakul. Collins is credited on the cover of the translation.
Goethe-Institut Award
This is a biennial award for new and emerging translators based in the United Kingdom and Ireland, whose literary translation work has not yet been published in print. The winner receives £1,000 / US$1,251, along with an invitation to Leipzig Book Fair with a place at the International Translators’ meeting organized by the Literary Colloquium Berlin.
- Winning this one is Rob Myatt for his translation of excerpts from Hund, Wolf, Schakal by Behzad Karim Khani (Hanser Berlin).
Jurors: Rebecca DeWald and Dr Christophe Fricker.
Premio Valle Inclán
This is an annual prize, again of £3,000 / US$3,784 for translation of full-length Spanish works.
- William Rowe and Helen Dimos are the honorees in this one, for their translation of Trilce by César Vallejo. Translations and Glosses (Veer Books, Crater Press).
Jurors: Juana Adcock, Dr Valentina Aparicio and Gerard Woodward.
The Schlegel-Tieck Prize
The Schlegel-Tieck Prize is given annually, with a purse of £3,000 / US$3,784 for translation from full-length work originally in German.
- Jamie Bulloch is the winner here for a translation of Hinterland by Arno Geiger (Pan Macmillan / Picador).
Jurors: Ayisha Malik, Anju Okhandiar and Florian Stadtler. We do not see credit for the translator on the cover of this book.
The Scott Moncrieff Prize
The Scott Moncrieff Prize annually awards £3,000 / US$3,784 to a translation into English from French in a full-length work.
- The winner of the Scott Moncrieff is Frank Wynne, a translator quite familiar to Publishing Perspectives readers, for his translation of Standing Heavy by GauZ’ (Hachette / MacLehose Press)
Jurors: Constance Bantman, Jane MacKenzie and David Mills. We do not see credit for the translator on the cover of this book.
The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Translation From Arabic
- Please see our standalone story on this one here.
Below is a recording of the February 7 presentation event at the British Library for the Society of Authors’ Translation Prizes.
More from Publishing Perspectives on translation is here. More from us on publishing and book awards programs is here, more on the Society of Authors is here, and more on the United Kingdom’s market is here.