The latest winner of the biennial €14,500 Franz Nabl-Preis -- the Literaturpreis der Stadt Graz ('literary prize of the city of Graz' -- Austria's second biggest city, and my hometown), an author (as opposed to book) prize (the Austrians, like the Germans, prefer doing the author- rather than book-honors) -- has been announced, and it is Slovenian-writing (a first !) Florjan Lipuš.
How serious to take the prize ? Well, they gave it to two Nobel laureates, pre-Stockholm -- Elias Canetti (1975) and Herta Müller (1997) -- and other prize winners include ... oh, just: Peter Handke, Christa Wolf, Martin Walser -- and, in more recent years, quite a few authors also available in translation (Terézia Mora, Josef Winkler, Urs Widmer, etc.). Not bad.
Good timing, too, because while you probably haven't gotten to Lipuš yet (at least in English) ... why, look here, Dalkey Archive Press have conveniently just come out with a translation (forty years after the fact and initial publication, but hey ...) of his The Errors of Young Tjaž -- a novel Peter Handke himself translated into German (which is a pretty decent seal of approval for a text). See their publicity page, or get your copy -- go on ! -- at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
How serious to take the prize ? Well, they gave it to two Nobel laureates, pre-Stockholm -- Elias Canetti (1975) and Herta Müller (1997) -- and other prize winners include ... oh, just: Peter Handke, Christa Wolf, Martin Walser -- and, in more recent years, quite a few authors also available in translation (Terézia Mora, Josef Winkler, Urs Widmer, etc.). Not bad.
Good timing, too, because while you probably haven't gotten to Lipuš yet (at least in English) ... why, look here, Dalkey Archive Press have conveniently just come out with a translation (forty years after the fact and initial publication, but hey ...) of his The Errors of Young Tjaž -- a novel Peter Handke himself translated into German (which is a pretty decent seal of approval for a text). See their publicity page, or get your copy -- go on ! -- at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.