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2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation shortlist announced
Six titles have been shortlisted for the third annual award of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. The 2019 prize is once again being judged by
· Amanda Hopkinson, Co-Director of Warwick Translates Summer School
· Boyd Tonkin, Special Adviser to the Man Booker International Prize, 2016-19
· Susan Bassnett, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick
The £1000 prize was established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and to increase the number of international women’s voices accessible by a British and Irish readership. Last year the prize was awarded to the novel Belladonna (Maclehose Press), written by the late Daša Drndić and translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth. The inaugural prize was awarded to Memoirs of a Polar Bear (Portobello Books, 2017), written by Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada and translated from German by Susan Bernofsky.
Among the shortlistees this year is Olga Tokarczuk, who was recently announced as the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. Tokarczuk is on the shortlist with literary crime novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Translator Lloyd-Jones appears on the longlist for the third year running.
2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation longlist announced
Prize coordinator, Dr Chantal Wright of the University of Warwick’s School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures, comments:
“The substantial increase in the number of entries received for this year’s competition shows that the publishing industry is gradually beginning to respond to initiatives such as the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, which is part of a much wider activist movement driven by a commitment from individuals such as Meytal Radzinski, who started Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth), and from independent publishers such as And Other Stories, who boldly took up Kamila Shamsie’s call to make 2018 a Year of Publishing Women.
“The work of the literary translation community in the UK and Ireland is vital to the cause of women in translation, and to the visibility of international literature in these insular times.”
Hear what our Director Maureen Freely has to say about Nobel Prize in Literature 2019 in TIME
Hear what our Director Maureen Freely has to say about the Nobel Prize in Literature 2019 in TIME
“They had to clean up their house, and I’m glad they’re able to relaunch this year,” says novelist and chair of English PEN Maureen Freely, who was a translator for Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. “I admire organizations that own up to their mistakes and try to do something about them. I far prefer that than the opposite,” she says. Freely, who was part of the judging panel for the 2019 International Booker Prize, says it’s important that some parts of the decision-making for such prizes are kept under wraps. “I prefer it when the rules of a judging panel are transparent, but I also understand how, at a certain point, you can’t let everybody in on every single decision or every single criteria.”
The Bookseller: Record-breaking year for Women in Translation award longlist
Indie publishers have dominated a record-breaking longlist for the third annual Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
And Other Stories, Seagull Books and Fitzcarraldo Editions each had two titles longlisted, while Pereine, Europa Editions and poetry publisher Bloodaxe Books have also been recognised. The 2019 prize sees judges Amanda Hopkinson, Boyd Tonkin and Susan Bassnett return to the panel.
The £1,000 prize, which aims to address gender imbalance in translated literature, saw eligible entries almost double this year with 92 entrants in 30 different languages. The 13 longlisted titles contain works translated from Farsi, Catalan and Lithuanian. The University of Warwick credits the rise in entrants in part to author Kamila Shamsie’s call in 2015 for presses to publish only women authors.
Maureen Freely gives her comment on Nobel Prize in Literature 2019 in the Guardian
"Maureen Freely, chair of English PEN and judge of this year’s International Booker, suggested the French author Annie Ernaux – who “writes in a genre all her own, defying the unwritten rules of the novel and the memoir to create new spaces for collective reflection” – and Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who “defies history itself, showing its official chroniclers to be charlatans and its actors to be lost in a maze of half truths”.
Antoine Berman's The Age of Translation. Translated and with an introduction by Chantal Wright. Routledge, 2018.
The Age of Translation is the first English translation of Antoine Berman’s commentary on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Chantal Wright’s translation includes an introduction which positions the text in relation to current developments in translation studies, and provides prefatory explanations before each section as a guide to Walter Benjamin’s ideas. These include influential concepts such as the ‘afterlife’ of literary works, the ‘kinship’ of languages, and the metaphysical notion of ‘pure language’. The Age of Translation is a vital read for students and scholars in the fields of translation studies, literary studies, cultural studies and philosophy.