The Society of Authors announces winners of £30k Translation Prizes

Ten literary translators and one editor have been announced as the winners of the Society of Authors’ Translation Prizes, sharing a prize fund of more than £30,000 together with the runners-up.

A translation from Eastern Armenian has been awarded a prize for the first time, with Deanna Cachoian-Schanz and editor Tatiana Ryckman winning the £3,000 TA First Translation Prize for A Book, Untitled by Shushan Avagyan (Tilted Axis Press). The runners-up are James Young and editor Stella Sabin, who will share £1,000 for a translation of The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer (Peirene Press) from Portuguese.

The judges for the TA First Translation Prize – Rahul Bery, Gesche Ipsen and Clare Richards – said: "A Book, Untitled’s rich, manifold facets and layers make it a work that begs to be read again and again; it indeed deserves to be studied at university translation programmes across the world. Deanna Cachoian-Schanz has brought Shushan Avagyan’s extraordinary accomplishment into English with such love, attention and finesse, there could not be a more deserving winner."

Translations into English from Italian, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Japanese and Dutch have also been awarded prizes this year.

The biennial John Florio Prize for translations of full-length Italian language works, sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute, has gone to Jenny McPhee, for a translation of Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante (New York Review Books Classics). McPhee has been awarded £3,000, while runner-up Brian Robert Moore wins £1,000 for a translation of A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano (Pushkin Press).  
Meanwhile, Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman and Alastair Reid have have won the annual Premio Valle Inclán for translations of full-length Spanish language works, for a translation of Maqroll’s Prayer and Other Poems by Álvaro Mutis (New York Review Books Poets). They have been awarded £3,000, and runner-up Kit Maude has been given a prize of £1,000 for a translation of Cousins by Aurora Venturini (Faber).

The winner of the annual £3,000 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize is Katharine Halls, for a translation of Rotten Evidence by Ahmed Naji (McSweeney’s).This prize was established by Banipal Magazine and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature and sponsored by the Saif Ghobash family in memory of their husband and father, the late Saif Ghobash, for published translations from Arabic of full-length works. 

The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize, an annual award for translations of Japanese-language works, has been awarded to Masaya Saito, who has won £3,000 for a translation of The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs by Sanki Saitō (Isobar Press). Runner-up David Boyd has also been awarded £1,000 for a translation of The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (Granta Publications).

Meanwhile, the winner of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translations from German is Andrew Shanks, for a translation of Revelation Freshly Erupting: Collected Poetry by Nelly Sachs (Carcanet Press). Shanks has been awarded £3,000, and runner-up Imogen Taylor wins a prize of £1,000 for a translation of Glorious People by Sasha Salzmann (Pushkin Press).

The Scott Moncrieff Prize for translations of French works are Patrick McGuinness and Stephen Romer, for their translation of The Day’s Ration: Selected Poems by Gilles Ortlieb (Arc Publications). The winners have been awarded £3,000, and runner-up Mark Polizzotti has won £1,000 for a translation of Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga (Daunt Books Publishing).

Finally, the winner of the  triennial Vondel Translation Prize for a translation of full-length Dutch work is Kristen Gehrman, who has been awarded €5,000 (£4,170) for a translation of The History of My Sexuality by Tobi Lakmaker (Granta Books). The runner-up in this category is David McKay for a translation of We Slaves of Suriname by Anton de Kom (Polity Press).