At the end of June, Austria’s most prestigious award for literary translators, the Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation,will be presented in Klagenfurt.
The 2013 prize goes to Dr. Uta Szyszkowitz, Austrian translator from French and English and honorary member of CEATL, and to Dr. Ahmet Cemal, Turkish translator of Austrian literature. Both are being honoured for their life-time achievements as literary translators.
In forty years of working as a literary translator, Uta Szyszkowitz has translated a wide range of genres from drama to literature for children and adolescents. In 1997 she received the Lower Austrian Province’s prize for achievements in art for the quality of her translations, and in 2002 her translation of a novel by Malika Ferdjoukh won the Austrian Prize for Children’s and Juvenile Literature.
The list of works translated by Dr. Ahmet Cemal reads like a who’s who of Austrian literature, and includes such authors as Bachmann, Broch, Canetti, Celan, Kafka, Musil, Rilke, Sperber and Zweig. His translations have won great critical acclaim for their outstanding quality. Among other honours he was presented with the Goldenes Verdienstzeichen der Republik Österreich in 2010.
The winners of the Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation are chosen from a number of nominees by a jury of experts, which also awards prizes for translations of single works published within the last five years. In 2013, forty-seven translations of Austrian literature into foreign languages and of foreign literature into German by Austrian translators received prizes ranging in value from €500 to €2200.