NEVERMORE shortlisted for the inaugural John Calder Translation Prize

The aim of the John Calder Translation Prize is to celebrate new and ambitious translations into English of full-length works which are distinguished by the highly personal and imaginative approach of the authors to their subject. 

“Translation creates a new republic of books that transcends boundaries and translators are often the unsung heroines/heroes. Our inaugural John Calder Translation Prize shortlist honours the art of translation and world literature. This is an impressive list of six books translated from languages including French, German, Spanish, and Swedish.”— Fiona Sze Lorrain, 2025 John Calder Translation Prize judge

The 2025 Translation Prizes ceremony will be held in February 2026
More information HERE

Star 111 awarded the ATA's Ungar German Translation Award

Tess Lewis’ translation of Lutz Seiler’s STAR 111 has won the 2025 American Translators Association’s Ungar German Translation Award!

The Ungar German Translation Award is given for a distinguished literary translation from German into English that has been published in the United States. The award is bestowed biennially in odd-numbered years and the winner was announced on October 23 at the ATA’s 66th Annual Conference in Boston.

More here

Star 111 and On the Marble Cliffs shortlisted for the ATA's Ungar German Translation Award

The American Translators Association is happy to announce a shortlist of nominees for the 2025 ATA Ungar German Translation Award!

The ATA Ungar German Translation Award is given for a distinguished literary translation from German into English that has been published in the United States. The award is bestowed biennially in odd-numbered years, and the winner will be announced on October 23 at the ATA’s 66th Annual Conference in Boston!

More here

Star 111 Shortlisted for the 2025 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translation Prize

The Goethe Institute NY announced this year’s shortlist comprising 3 translations of extraordinary merit:

Tess Lewis’s translation of Lutz Seiler’s Star 111
Paul Reitter’s translation of Karl Marx’s Capital
Nick Somers’s translation of Ines Geipel’s Behind the Wall.

Jury Chair Shelley Frisch on the jury's decision:
"This trio of shortlisted texts impressively displays the power of words, from three distinct perspectives, even though two of them—one a memoir, and the other a work of fiction, both appearing in English for the first time—focus on the German Democratic Republic; the third, a new translation of a nineteenth-century study of political economy, came to shake and shape the world. All three translations are marked by inspired word choices make their texts come alive in their new linguistic garb.

My column spotlighting excellent translations launched at The Arts Fuse

In my new bimonthly column for The Arts Fuse, I'll be shining a spotlight on exceptional translations and translators. My first column lights up with translations / adaptations / riffs / homages of Urdu, Russian and French poetry as well as Sanskrit folk tales.
In tribute to the slipperiness of language and the way words can change meaning depending on context and circumstances, this bi-monthly feature will appear twice a month or every two months, depending on circumstances.

STAR 111 Nominated for the Dublin Literary Award

NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
In Lutz Seiler’s “Stern 111” Carl Bischoff, the main character, is left to navigate post-Wall Berlin alone after his parents abruptly disappear. Immersed in the city’s underground scene, Carl seeks belonging among bohemians and artists while uncovering family secrets. The novel captures the quest for identity and freedom in a transforming Germany. (Stadtbibliothek Bremen) After Kruso, Star 111 opens up an atmospheric panorama of the German post-reunification period in a touching and exciting way. The novel depicts the attempts of a son and his parents to find their new fortune in Berlin and the West. Anarchy and chaos characterise the big story and the individual fates of the family members of two generations from East Germany. (Zentralbibliothek Zürich)

The full 2025 longlist can be found here. The shortlist will be announced 25 March, and the winner on 22 May.

STAR 111 named one of the NYT Best Historical Fiction of 2024

An autobiographical picaresque that reconstructs the exhilarating yet often terrifying experiences of individual East Germans in that brief period between the collapse of the Communist regime and reunification. Its central character, a 26-year-old aspiring poet, drifts through East Berlin’s anarchic underground squatter scene after his parents abandon their home and flee to a refugee camp in the West.

The New York Times 12/6/2024

On the Marble Cliffs shortlisted for the 2024 Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize

The six books that constitute this year’s shortlist—Yevgenia Beloruset’s War Diary, translated by Greg Nissan, Thomas Brussig’s The Short End of the Sonnenallee, translated by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson, Max Czollek’s De-Integrate, translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot, translated by Peter Wortsman, Florian Illies’ Love in a Time of Hate, translated by Simon Pare, and Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs, translated by Tess Lewis—take us from marble cliffs in the early twentieth century, to a romp through real-life love stories in that same troubled era, to marvelous tales of the uncanny in the Romantic past, to a narrative of the Ukraine invasion in progress right now, to a concrete-and-barbed wire wall in the waning days of the German Democratic Republic, to a polemic about figurative walls that continue to define, divide, and de-integrate us.

Read the Goethe Institut announcement here.

Women in Translation Month Feature

From the Seagull Books Newsletter

This year I’m celebrating WiT with a regional flair—for me August 2024 is ‘Austrian Women in Translation Month’. My works-in-progress are two novellas by the doyennes of contemporary Austrian literature—Ingeborg Bachmann’s The Honditsch Cross and Christine Lavant’s The Changeling—and two novels by writers who were deeply influenced by them—Maja Haderlap’s Shadow Women and Laura Freudenthaler’s Arson.  Look for them in August next year . . . if not sooner!”

Epic Annette, by Anne Weber is shortlisted for the 2023 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize

Society of Authors Announcement

Bringing artistry to both verse and prose, this year’s collection blends diverse content, captivating register, tone, and style with exquisitely pertinent language. The ingenuity of these exceptional prose disclose personal tales of relationships and sorrow, of justice and equality, of friendship across generations, of war and love, of loneliness, of dramatic escape, while balancing the thin prospect of humour, change, and hope – they already belong to the classics. Jury statement

Tess Lewis has been awarded the 2023 Friedrich Ulfers Prize

The Friedrich Ulfers Prize was established in 2013 and is awarded annually by Deutsches Haus at New York University to a leading publisher, writer, critic, translator, or scholar who has championed the advancement of German-language literature in the United States. The prize, which is endowed with a $5000 grant, has previously been awarded to Riky Stock, Jill Schoolman, Susan Bernofsky, Barbara Perlmutter, Barbara Epler, Burton Pike, Robert Weil, Sara Bershtel, and Carol Brown Janeway. The Friedrich Ulfers Prize is Festival Neue Literatur’s testimony to the rising importance of German-language literature in America.

The American Library in Paris names Tess Lewis a Scholar of Note

Following a competitive application cycle, we are delighted to welcome five brilliant thinkers to the Library in the coming year. From translation to avant-garde jazz to the Haitian Revolution, the projects they will develop showcase both excellence and variety. They join an impressive roster of intellectuals and authors who have been awarded the Visiting Fellowship in previous years, from Mark Braude to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Our warmest congratulations to 2023—24 Visiting Fellows Adam Shatz and Christian Campbell, and 2023—24 Scholars of Note Vanessa Onwuemezi, Lauren Oyler, and Tess Lewis.

ALP announcement here