Best Translated Book Awards winners

       They've announced the winners of the Best Translated Book Awards, and they are:

• Fiction: Seiobo There Below by Krasznahorkai László, translation by Ottilie Mulzet; runners-up: A True Novel by Mizumura Minae, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, and The African Shore by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated by Jeffrey Gray
  
  
• Poetry: The Guest in the Wood by Elisa Biagini, translated by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky; runners-up: Four Elemental Bodies by Claude Royet-Journoud, translated by Keith Waldrop, and The Oasis of Now by Sohrab Sepehri, translated by Kazim Ali and Mohammad Jafar Mahallati

       Krasznahorkai is, amazingly, a repeat-winner, since he also took the prize last year (with a different translator, however). I was one of the judges for the fiction prize -- and while there were a lot of very strong titles in the running it was pretty clear there were few reasons other than perhaps the fact that he'd won it before to deny this work the prize. It really is something quite remarkable -- both the work itself and the translation -- if a bit difficult to come to grips to (yes, I haven't managed to shape a review into anything satisfactory yet, hence none so far ...); see also the jury statement -- and the New Directions publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.