The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation (GBSF) Translation Prize is an annual award for translations into English of full-length Japanese-language works of literary merit and general interest. The winner is awarded £3,000 and a runner-up is awarded £1,000.
Generously supported by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the prize will be awarded for the first time in February 2024.
The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize is now open for submissions. Please enter below.
Deadline for entries: 31 March 2025.
The 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize winner
Masaya Saito for a translation of The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs by Sanki Saitō (Isobar Press)
Photography © Natalie Thorpe
‘The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs 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.’
Maya Jaggi, 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize judge
The 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize runner-up
David Boyd for a translation of The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (Granta Publications)
Photography © Natalie Thorpe
‘In general, it is not an easy task to translate from Japanese to English as the languages and cultures are so far apart. It is even so, I imagine, when translating a piece like The Factory since the story is set in a peculiar world to the point we sometimes feel it is inscrutable. For this reason, it could be said that David Boyd has translated the untranslatable. So brilliantly. His attention to details is amazing and it is such an enjoyable piece to read.’
Nozomi Abe, 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize judge
The 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize shortlist
Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell for a translation of Kappa by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (New Directions)
Brian Bergstrom for a translation of Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth by Kōhei Saitō (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Publishing Group Ltd)
Alison Watts for a translation of What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama (Doubleday, Penguin Random House)
Kendall Heitzman for a translation of Nails and Eyes by Kaori Fujino (Pushkin Press)
‘This year we even saw a broadening of genre with memoir and non-fiction titles sitting alongside fiction. While the judging was difficult, it was a pleasure to read all the submitted works, and I’m so pleased to see Japanese writing getting the attention it deserves in Britain.’
Nick Bradley, 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize judge
If you are interested in any of the books here please visit Bookshop.org.
Nozomi Abe
Nozomi Abe is a lecturer in Translation and Japanese Studies at Cardiff University. She studied Creative Writing and completed her MSc in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh and PhD in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia. Nozomi’s work in both Japanese and English is richly varied. Her translation work into Japanese, all performed in Tokyo, include Mary Stuart, Great Expectations, Anna Karenina, La Strada and The Bodyguard the Musical. She also translates into English and her works include Lautrec the Musical, Sempo the Musical, Tenshu-Tale, Forbidden, On Air, The Sun and The Obelisk of the Beast.
Nick Bradley
Nick Bradley holds a PhD from UEA focussing on the figure of the cat in Japanese literature. He lived in Japan for many years where he worked as a translator, and currently teaches on the Creative Writing master’s programmes at the University of Cambridge and UEA. His debut novel, The Cat and The City, was published in 2020. His second, Four Seasons in Japan was published in June 2023.
Maya Jaggi
Maya Jaggi is an award-winning writer, critic, cultural journalist and artistic director. A contributing art critic for FT Weekend, she was a profile writer and fiction critic for the Guardian Review for a decade. Her independent writing on literature and art has appeared widely, including in the New York Review of Books, The Economist, The New York Times and TLS, and she is Critic at Large for Words Without Borders in New York. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Open University for ‘extending the map of international writing,’ She chaired the jury of the Man Asian Literature Prize in Hong Kong, and is jury chair of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Literature Prize 2024.
2023 (presented 2024)
Winner:
Alison Watts for a translation of The Boy and the Dog by Seishu Hase (Scribner, Simon and Schuster)
Runners-up:
David Boyd for a translation of Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada (Granta)
Sam Bett and David Boyd for a translation of All The Lovers In The Night by Mieko Kawakami (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
Shortlisted:
Sam Bett for a translation of The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai (New Directions)
Margaret Mitsutani for a translation of Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada (Granta)
Alison Watts for a translation of Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda (Bitter Lemon Press)
The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation
The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation was established in 1985 as a non-governmental, non-profit making body with the purpose of helping to develop and sustain good relations between the United Kingdom and Japan. Its main objective is to promote among the people of both countries, in a global context, a mutual knowledge, understanding and appreciation of each other’s culture, society, and achievements.