Ten literary translators and one editor have been announced as the winners of this year’s Society of Authors’ Translation Prizes, which will be celebrated at the Translation Prizes ceremony this evening (12 February 2025) at the British Library and broadcast online. Together with the runners-up, they will share a prize fund of over £30,000.
This year saw the first translation from Eastern Armenian to win a prize at the awards, with Deanna Cachoian-Schanz and editor Tatiana Ryckman taking home the TA First Translation Prize for A Book, Untitled by Shushan Avagyan.
Prizes were also awarded for translations into English from Italian, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Japanese and Dutch.
The Vondel Translation Prize, a triennial award for a translation from Dutch, went to translator Kristen Gehrman for a translation of The History of My Sexuality by Tobi Lakmaker.
Other winners include Jenny McPhee for her ‘patient and imaginative’ translation from Italian of Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante and Masaya Saito for his ‘sparkling’ translation from Japanese of The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs by Sanki Saitō.
Thank you to The British Library for their continued partnership and for hosting this event.
The Translation Prizes are sponsored by Amazon Literary Partnerships and Hawthornden Foundation.
The Winners
John Florio Prize
A biennial award for translations into English of full–length Italian language works of literary merit and general interest generously sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute. The winner is awarded £3,000 and a runner–up is awarded £1,000. This year’s judges are Maame Blue, Jamie McKendrick, and Sandra Silipo.
Winner: Jenny McPhee for a translation of Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante (New York Review Books Classics)
Judge Sandra Silipo said:
This translation of Elsa Morante’s first novel Menzogna e Sortilegio is an extraordinary achievement, not only because of the daunting amount of words that constitute the book, but mostly because of the unpredictable and complex ways in which Morante uses words to represent an insidious reality permeated with deception and self-deception. This often requires the translator to unravel phrases and sentences and to write them again for her audience, something that Jenny McPhee is doing generously and indefatigably throughout the book. Time and again, she travels to the heart of the text and emerges from its depths holding the translation as a gift for the contemporary readers.
Runner-up: Brian Robert Moore for a translation of A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano (Pushkin Press)
Premio Valle Inclán
An annual prize for translations into English of full–length Spanish language works of literary merit and general interest. The winner is awarded £3,000 and a runner–up is awarded £1,000. This year’s judges are Valentina Aparicio, Gaby Sambuccetti and Gerard Woodward.
Winners: Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman and Alastair Reid for a translation of Maqroll’s Prayer and Other Poems by Álvaro Mutis (New York Review Books Poets)
Judge Valentina Aparicio said:
Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, and Alastair Reid’s needed translation of the poetry of Alvaro Mutis’ Maqroll’s Prayer and Other Poems provides a fascinating example of the impressive scope of abilities of this collaborative team of translators. This volume provides a spectacular sample of the variety of form in Mutis’ poetry, ranging from the more traditional Spanish poetic structures to the most experimental poetry and prose poems of this authors. This volume is a masterful example of collaboration in translation, and it reveals a deep and intimate understanding of Mutis’ complex work.
Runner up: Kit Maude for a translation of Cousins by Aurora Venturini (Faber)
Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize
An annual award, established by Banipal Magazine and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature and sponsored by the Saif Ghobash family in memory of their husband and father, the late Saif Ghobash, for published translations from Arabic of full–length works of imaginative and creative writing of literary merit and general interest. The winner is awarded £3,000. This year’s judges are Raphael Cohen (chair), Michael Caines, Laura Watkinson, and Nariman Youssef.
Winner: Katharine Halls for a translation of Rotten Evidence by Ahmed Naji (McSweeney’s)
The judges said:
If Ahmed Naji had known the consequences of writing his novel The Use of Life (shortlisted in 2018 in Ben Koerber’s translation), would he have ever written it? ‘Was it really worth it? Is the written word worth so huge a sacrifice?’ he wonders at moments of despair in prison. Publication of a chapter of that novel in an Egyptian literary magazine throws him into a Kafkaesque confrontation with the Egyptian authorities, and he serves ten months in prison for violating public decency. Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison charts his journey through the courts and prison in a narrative that mixes details of his life and his case with the reality of prison and oppression in Egypt. He also meditates on a wide range of topics including prison literature and libraries, sexual vocabulary in Arabic, and his childhood experiences as son of a leading figure in the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Katharine Hall’s wonderful translation captures the emotional range of the book which ranges from blackest humour to blackest despair.
The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize
An annual award for translations into English of full–length Japanese–language works of literary merit and general interest generously supported by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. The winner is awarded £3,000 and a runner–up is awarded £1,000. This year’s judges are Nozomi Abe, Nick Bradley and Maya Jaggi.
Winner: Masaya Saito for a translation of The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs by Sanki Saitō (Isobar Press)
Judge Maya Jaggi said:
The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs by Sanki Saito is an astonishingly frank wartime testament by one of Japan’s preeminent poets, and a gripping portrait of the artist as an anti-war bohemian rebel. Detained as a leader of the ‘unpatriotic’ New Rising Haiku movement, Saito abandoned Tokyo and family respectability in the early 1940s to live in a grungy hotel in the cosmopolitan port of Kobe, among spies, drifters and bar hostesses. Besides liaisons amid air raids that killed most of the characters, he recalls a resented love child, his antipathy towards authority, and aesthetic renewal after the 1945 firebombing. Masaya Saito’s sparkling revision of his own translation made 30 years earlier recovers this masterpiece for a new generation.
Runner-up: David Boyd for a translation of The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (Granta Publications)
Schlegel-Tieck Prize
An annual award for translations into English of full–length German works of literary merit and general interest. The winner is awarded £3,000 and a runner–up is awarded £1,000. This year’s judges are Gabriel Gbadamosi, Anju Okhandiar and Shaun Whiteside.
Winner: Andrew Shanks for a translation of Revelation Freshly Erupting: Collected Poetry by Nelly Sachs (Carcanet Press)
Judge Gabriel Gbadamosi said:
If ever a poet were overdue a re-introduction to English language readers it would the Nobel Prize-winning Nelly Sachs, and particularly in these ‘approximative’ versions by translator Andrew Shanks. Dealing with one German Jewish writer’s response to the attempted extermination of the Jewish people – to genocidal violence and its implications for the human being – these poems insist, in that nightmare moment ‘when sleep like smoke invades the flesh’, that ‘the persecuted should not become the persecutors’.
Runner-up: Imogen Taylor for a translation of Glorious People by Sasha Salzmann (Pushkin Press)
Scott Moncrieff Prize
An annual award for translations into English of full–length French works of literary merit and general interest generously sponsored by the Institut français du Royaume-Uni. The winner is awarded £3,000 and a runner–up is awarded £1,000. This year’s judges are Constance Bantman, David Mills and Shumona Sinha.
Winners: Patrick McGuinness and Stephen Romer for a translation of The Day’s Ration: Selected Poems by Gilles Ortlieb (Arc Publications)
Judge David Mills said:
Gilles Ortlieb is a wonderful poet whose work scrutinises the landscapes of human intervention, from post-industrial wastelands to marginal urban environments, while detailing the ‘quasi non-events’ that fill our lives, bringing out their beauty, often with sly humour. The translation by Patrick McGuinness and Stephen Romer reaches for the delicacy, subtle shifts and sense of transience in Ortlieb’s work and gets them superbly, so much so that I find myself moving between the original texts and the translations, each adding to the other while I enjoy both.
Runner-up: Mark Polizzotti for a translation of Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga (Daunt Books Publishing)
TA First Translation Prize
An annual prize for a debut literary translation into English generously endowed by Daniel Hahn and Jo Heinrich. The winner is awarded £3,000 and a runner–up is awarded £1,000. The prize is shared between the translator and their editor. This year’s judges are Rahul Bery, Gesche Ipsen, and Clare Richards.
Winners: Deanna Cachoian-Schanz and editor Tatiana Ryckman for a translation from Eastern Armenian of A Book, Untitled by Shushan Avagyan (Tilted Axis Press)
The judges said:
Deanna Cachoian-Schanz’s translation of Shushan Avagyan’s A Book, Untitled is none other than a feat and a triumph. Its scope and ambition both as a novel and translation are unrivalled. A Book, Untitled’s rich, manifold facets and layers make it a work that begs to be read again and again; it indeed deserves to be studied at university translation programmes across the world. Deanna Cachoian-Schanz has brought Shushan Avagyan’s extraordinary accomplishment into English with such love, attention and finesse, there could not be a more deserving winner.
Runners-up: James Young and editor Stella Sabin for a translation from Portuguese of The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer (Peirene Press)
Vondel Translation Prize
A triennial prize for a translation into English of a full-length Dutch work of literary merit and general interest sponsored and administered by the Dutch Foundation for Literature. The winner is awarded €5,000. This year’s judges are David Doherty, Claire Lowdon and Susan Massotty.
Winner: Kristen Gehrman for a translation of The History of My Sexuality by Tobi Lakmaker (Granta Books)
The judges said:
Tobi Lakmaker’s The History of My Sexuality combines deliciously brisk storytelling with the irreverent observation and punchy delivery of a killer stand-up routine. Paying gleeful homage to Salinger, the novel’s deftly spliced chronology sidesteps sentimentality and taps into unexpected seams of loss and heartbreak in its final section. Kristen Gehrman brings Lakmaker’s bold narrative voice memorably to life with verve and irresistible comic timing.
Runner-up: David McKay for a translation of We Slaves of Suriname by Anton de Kom (Polity Press)
- Shop the winners, runners-up and shortlistees on our Bookshop.org page. Any commission made from sales of books on Bookshop.org. will go towards the Society of Authors’ Access Fund.
- RSVP to the livestream here.