Germany

Joel Scott

Joel Scott is a poet and translator from Sydney, Australia, currently a resident in Berlin. He translates from German and Spanish into English. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies from Macquarie University. He is currently working on translating the third volume of Peter Weiss’s magnum opus Die Ästhetik des Widerstands which …

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Damion Searls

The 2019 award went to Damion Searls for his translation from the German of Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl by Uwe Johnson. Set in 1967, the book follows the lives of Gesine Cresspahl, a German émigré to Manhattan and single mother to ten-year-old Marie, dedicating a chapter for each day …

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Susan Bernofsky

The 2019 award went to Susan Bernofsky for her translation from the German of Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck. Erpenbeck is the award-winning author of seven novels, five of which Bernofsky has translated into English. Erpenbeck’s moving 2015 novel Go, Went, Gone recounts the story of a former (East German) academic who befriends and …

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Joel Agee

For his translation of Hans Erich Nossack’s The End: Hamburg 1943, available in a beautifully-designed edition of the haunting text on the destruction of the German port city.

John Felstiner

For his translation of the Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan.

Mark Harman

Harman’s new translation of The Castle, by Franz Kafka, updates the 1930 Edwin Muir version and, in the words of the MLA citation, ensures “that its influence … will in the next century be as powerful as it has in this.” At the time, Harman was at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.