The Society of Authors’ and the Goethe-Institut Londons’ 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 Goethe-Institut Award is now open for submissions.
Please submit your translation of the Der Beste Tag Seit Langem extract by Jana Volkmann available below via the online form.
Deadline for entries: 11 August 2025
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).
Read a Q&A with 2023 Goethe-Institut Award winner, Rob Myatt, about his journey as a translator here.
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.
