They've announced that Shelley Frisch will receive this year's Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize -- and the $10,000 that goes with it -- for her translation of Reiner Stach's Kafka: The Years of Insight (see the Princeton University Press publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk).
Among the admirable qualities of this prize is that they reveal all the titles in contention for the prize every year -- and the list of submitted books (see last year's) also makes for a great overview of German titles that have been translated into English in the past year. (The Three Percent databases only cover fiction and poetry -- i.e. no non-fiction, such as the Stach titles -- and also don't cover re-translations, which are eligible for the Wolff Translator's Prize.)
It's also interesting to see who publishes these translations -- and of the 59 submitted titles for this year's prize I count (and I may be off by a few in that total) an amazing 13 were published by India-based publisher Seagull Books, and 11 by ... Las Vegas-based AmazonCrossing.
Among the admirable qualities of this prize is that they reveal all the titles in contention for the prize every year -- and the list of submitted books (see last year's) also makes for a great overview of German titles that have been translated into English in the past year. (The Three Percent databases only cover fiction and poetry -- i.e. no non-fiction, such as the Stach titles -- and also don't cover re-translations, which are eligible for the Wolff Translator's Prize.)
It's also interesting to see who publishes these translations -- and of the 59 submitted titles for this year's prize I count (and I may be off by a few in that total) an amazing 13 were published by India-based publisher Seagull Books, and 11 by ... Las Vegas-based AmazonCrossing.