The Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize

The Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. It was founded by Lord Weidenfeld and is supported by New College, The Queen's College, and St Anne's College, Oxford. The closing date for this year's entries was 31 January.

Recent winners include: David Hackston for Pajtim Statovci’s Crossing (Pushkin); Celia Hawkesworth for Ivo Andrić’s Omer Pasha Latas (New York Review Books); Lisa Dillman for Andrés Barba’s Such Small Hands (Portobello); Frank Perry for Lina Wolff's Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs (And Other Stories); Philip Roughton for Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s The Heart of Man (MacLehose); Paul Vincent and John Irons for 100 Dutch-Language Poems (Holland Park); Susan Bernofsky for Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days (Portobello); Susan Wicks for Valérie Rouzeau’s Talking Vrouz (Arc); Philip Boehm for Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel (Portobello); Judith Landry for Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus).

"Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture"

- Anthony Burgess

The 2021 shortlist is:

• David Diop, At Night All Blood Is Black, translated from French by Anna Moschovakis (Pushkin)
• Graciliano Ramos, São Bernardo, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan (NYRB)
• Andrzej Tichý, Wretchedness, translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley (And Other Stories)
• Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Discomfort of the Evening, translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison (Faber)
• Vénus Khoury-Ghata, The Last days of Mandelstam, translated from French by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Seagull)
• Ulrike Almut Sandig, I Am a Field Full of Rapeseed, Give Cover to Deer and Shine Like Thirteen Oil Paintings Laid One on Top of the Other, translated from German by Karen Leeder (Seagull)
• Esther Kinsky, Grove, translated from German by Caroline Schmidt (Fitzcarraldo)
• Guadalupe Nettel, Bezoar, translated from Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine (Seven Stories Press)

This year’s judges are Patrick McGuinness, Laura Seymour, Holly Langstaff, and Karolina Watroba (Chair).

We will announce the winner of the Prize on Oxford Translation Day (12 June 2021) in an online video available on OCCT’s Oxford-Weidenfeld webpage. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, Oxford Translation Day will take place as a series of online events, which will also include recordings of the shortlisted translators discussing their work.
 

The winner of the 2020 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize was David Hackston for his translation of Pajtim Statovci’s Crossing (Pushkin Press). This was announced on 30 September 2020 – International Translation Day – during an online ceremony hosted by English PEN. Read the judges’ citations about the individual translations here.

To accompany the award of the Prize, St Anne’s and Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) have uploaded a number of videos in which the shortlisted translators discuss or read from their respective translations. 

Enquiries about the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize should be directed to the Prize administrator, Dr Eleni Philippou, at Comparative.Criticism@st-annes.ox.ac.uk.

1999: Jonathan Galassi for his translation of Eugenio Montale's Collected Poems (Carcanet)

2000: Margaret Jull Costa for her translation of José Saramago's All the Names (Harvill)

2001: Edwin Morgan for his translation of Phèdre by Jean Racine (Carcanet) into Scots

2002: Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Banffy-Jelen for Miklós Bánffy's They Were Divided (Arcadia)

2003: Ciaran Carson for his translation of Dante Alighieri's Inferno (Granta)

2004: Michael Hofmann for his translation of Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel (Penguin)

2005: Denis Jackson for his translation of Theodor Storm's Paul the Puppeteer (Angel Books)

2006: Len Rix for his translation of Magda Szabó's The Door (Harvill Secker)

2007: Michael Hofmann for his translation of Durs Grünbein's Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems (Faber)

2008: Margaret Jull Costa for her translation of Eça de Queiroz's The Maias (Dedalus)

2009: Anthea Bell for her translation of Saša Stanišić's How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

2010: Jamie McKendrick for his translation of Valerio Magrelli's The Embrace: Selected Poems (Faber and Faber)

2011: Margaret Jull Costa for her translation of José Saramago's The Elephant's Journey (Harvill Secker)

2012: Judith Landry for her translation of Diego Marani's New Finnish Grammar

2013: Philip Boehm for his translation of Herta Müller's The Hunger Angel (Portobello)

2014: Susan Wicks for her translation of Valérie Rouzeau's Talking Vrouz

2015: Susan Bernofsky for her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days

2016: Joint Winners: Paul Vincent and John Irons for their translation of 100 Dutch-Language Poems (Holland Park Press) & Philip Roughton for his translation of Jón Kalman Stefánsson's The Heart of Man (MacLehose Press)

2017: Frank Perry for his translation of Lina Wolff's Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs (And Other Stories)

2018: Lisa Dillman for her translation of Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba (Portobello Books)

2019: Celia Hawkesworth for her translation of Ivo Andrić's, Omer Pasha Latas (New York Review Books)

‘Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.’

- Milan Kundera