Germany

Eva Lüdi Kong has been awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for Translation for Die Reise in den Westen (‘Travel into the West’), her translation of an at least 400 year old Chinese book. In this book, whose author is unknown, four pilgrims who have been expelled from heaven and condemned to earth, describe their travel west to honour Buddha. →

On 11th June, the translator, novelist and jazz singer Frank Heibert was honoured for his translation of Tenth of December, a collection of short stories by George Saunders, winner of the British Folio Prize 2014. Heibert translates literature and theatre from English, French, Italian and Portuguese, by authors such as Don De Lillo, Richard Ford, William Faulkner, Boris Vian, Raymond Quenau and Yasmina Reza. →

Last March, the German author, editor and translator Brigitte Döbert was awarded two important prizes for her translation of Die Tutoren, the monumental novel by the Serbian author Bora Ćosić, who left Serbia 1992 in protest against the regime. The 800-page cult epic tells the story of five generations and uses a vast array of literary techniques and genres, from farmer’s almanac and folk legend, to instruction manals, quotes from James Joyce, kitchen recipes and imaginary concoctions, constituting an enormous literary compendium of the Serbian language and gaining it a reputation for being hugely challenging for translators. →

The German author and  translator Anne Weber has been awarded the 2016 Johann Heinrich Voß Prize for Translation by the German Academy for Language and Poetry (Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung) for her work from French into German. The prize is worth €15,000 and will be presented during the Academy’s spring meeting, which will take place from 21 to 23 April 2016 in Köthen, Saxony-Anhalt. →

The 2015 Leipzig Book Fair Prize for Translation has been awarded to Mirjam Pressler for her German translation of Amos Oz’s novel Judas. The Jury commended her work for its natural tonality and for conveying an intimate atmosphere against the backdrop of momentous socio-political events. Mirjam Pressler is an author in her own right, as well as being a translator of Hebrew, English and Dutch literature. →

The Art Foundation NRW (North Rhine-Westphalia) in cooperation with the EUK Straelen (‘European Translators’ College’) have given this year’s Straelen Lifetime Achievement Translation Award to the Dutch literary translator Gerrit Bussink for his translations from German.

Bussink, who has been translating since 1972, enables the Dutch reception of important German-language authors from Germany, Austria and Switzerland – authors like Martin Walser, Thomas Bernhard, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Christa Wolf, Siegfried Lenz and Peter Handke. →

On 9 October the Paul Celan Prize 2014 was awarded to Gerhard Meier. Meier (b.1957) was honoured for his corpus of translations from French and Turkish into German. Works he has translated include novels by Amin Maalouf, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Murathan Mungan, Yaşar Kemal and Sait Faik Abasıyanık. The jury made special mention of Meier’s translations of six novels by Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, whose ‘stylistic elegance Meier manages to maintain admirably in German.’

Gerhard Meier studied Romance and German Philology at Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität in München and Translation Studies at Mainz University in Germersheim. →