The Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium in Straelen, Germany has announced the winner of the 2018 Straelen Translator’s Prize, which this year honors a translator of German-language literature into English. The prize is awarded by the Kunststiftung NRW (Foundation for the Arts of North Rhine-Westphalia). I’m so delighted to see Katy Derbyshire honored in this way; for years, she’s been a key and very active member of the transatlantic translation community, most recently helping to bring the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation into being. The Straelener Übersetzerpreis, a nice, hefty prize (€25,000) honors a translator with a substantial body of work as well as recognizing a particular book (in this case her translation of Bricks and Mortar [Im Stein] by Clemens Meyer).
The secondary prize (“sponsorship award” or Förderpreis) given at the same time has gone to Simon Pare for his translation of The Flying Mountain (Der fliegende Berg) by Christoph Ransmayr.
The two Straelen prizes rotate between languages, so there won’t be another one going to an English-language translator for a while, I reckon.
Big congratulations, Katy (and Simon)!