German – Goethe-Institut Award

The Society of Authors’ and the Goethe-Institut London‘s biennial Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation.

The Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation was founded in 2010 and is presented by the Society of Authors and the Goethe-Institut London every two years. This translation prize is aimed at new and emerging translators based in the UK and Ireland, whose literary translation work has not yet been published in print.

The winner is awarded €1,000 and is invited to attend the Leipzig Book Fair (usually held in March each year), including a place at the International Translators’ meeting organised by the Literary Colloquium Berlin. Entry is open to UK and Irish nationals and those who have been resident in the UK or Ireland for the past three years.


The 2023 Goethe-Institut Award winner


Rob Myatt

The prize is awarded for the best translation of extracts from Hund, Wolf, Schakal by Behzad Karim Khani (Hanser Berlin, 2022) (left).

The winning entry is a remarkably original translation whose mastery of voice we thoroughly enjoyed. We believe that it does what translations do at their best: write the next chapter of the life of a book originally published elsewhere. In that, it validates the challenges and ambitions of the book’s protagonists themselves.
— The Goethe-Institut judges


The 2023 Goethe-Institut Award runner-up


Fiona Graham

This excellent translation stood out thanks to its poetic expressiveness, featuring many idiomatic renderings and creative solutions. The translation takes risks without every overstepping the line, and shows what a tight call the selection process was.
— The Goethe-Insitut judges


The 2023 Goethe-Institut Award shortlist


Nick Browne

Caroline Summers

Anne Thompson Melo

Stuart Vizard


Dr Rebecca Dewald

Dr Rebecca DeWald is a bilingual translator for English, German, French and occasionally Spanish. She coordinates the Emerging Translator Mentorships Programme at the National Centre for Writing, runs the Translators’ Stammtisch and Translation Theory Lab at the Goethe-Institut Glasgow, and serves as co-chair of the Translators Association. Her most recent translation is Tagebuch einer Invastion by Andrey Kurkov (Haymon, 2022). You can find her on twitter at @DeWald_Rebecca

Christophe Fricker

Christophe Fricker has translated works by Garielle Lutz, James Dickey, Yanko Tsvetkov, Owen Jones, Matthias Politycki, Hugh Aldersey-Williams and others, from either English to German or vice versa. Christophe teaches Translation at the University of Bristol, where he leads on the Bristol Translates summer school. Among his awards, as translator and author, are a first prize at the John Dryden Competition.

2020 

Kay McBurney for a translation of an extract from Die Fahrt by Sibylle Berg (Penguin Verlag). 

2018

Mandy Wight for a translation of an extract from Unterleuten by Juli Zeh (Random House). 

2016 

Imogen Taylor for a translation of an extract from Momente der Klarheit by Jackie Thomae (Hanser Berlin).

2014

Caroline Waight for a translation of an extract from Fliehkräfte by Stephan Thome (Suhrkamp). 

2012 

Katy Derbyshire for a translation of an extract from the novel Das Geschenk by Wolf Wondratschek (Hanser). 

The runner-up for the 2012 award was Helen MacCormac.

2010

 Samuel Pakucs Willcocks for a translation of an extract from the novel Du bist zu schnell by Zoran Drvenkar (Klett-Cotta). 

The runner-up for the 2010 award was Jamie Lee Searle.

Goethe-Institut

The Goethe-Institut, Germany’s cultural institute, operates worldwide, promoting knowledge of the German language abroad and fostering international cultural collaborations. Our cultural and educational programmes offer an opportunity to engage with themes and questions relevant to contemporary German culture and society. Faced with the challenges of globalisation, we aim to strengthen intercultural dialogue and a global civil society.