The Scott Moncrieff Prize
The Society of Authors will be hosting its annual awards celebration for the Translation Prizes at the British Library’s Knowledge Centre on the 13th of February.
They will be presenting the prizes for Arabic, Italian, German, French, Swedish, and Spanish translation into English, as well as the TA First Translation prize for a debut literary translation into English published in the UK.
The winners and runners-up will be presented with their prizes during the ceremony, which will be followed by drinks.
The 2018 award has been judged by Ruth Cruickshank and Michele Roberts, who have chosen the following books:
Seven Stories by Venus Khoury-Ghata, translated by Aneesa Abbas-Higgins, published by Jacaranda Books. The novel is a powerful tale of female empowerment and quest for justice, set in a remote community in the desert, in which a woman has just been condemned to death by stoning. Women have to come together as a way to resist the patriarchal oppression and to try and save her. We had previously had the pleasure to publish an interview of Aneesa Abbas-Higgins on the difficulty of translating the text while doing justice to the Arabic poetry pervading the prose.
Blue Self-Portrait by Noemi Lefebvre, translated by Sophie Lewis and published by Transit Books. This book was supported by the French Institute (UK) as part of the Burgess programme. It tells the story of a French woman who becomes haunted by her encounter with an American-German pianist-composer, and who imerges herself in German culture through an obsession with Arnold Schoenberg's portrait, Adorno, and Thomas Mann.
Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou, translated by Helen Stevenson and published by The New Press. A rollicking new novel described as “Oliver Twist in 1970s Africa” (Les Inrockuptibles), it is a picaresque rendering of the life of Moses, from his flight from the orphanage to the streets and repressive reality of Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s and ’80s.
Vernon Subutex 1 by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne and published by MacLehose Press. A hugely popular phenomenon in France, the first volume of this trilogy follows the fall into poverty of Vernon
Subutex, a record shop owner, who finds himself relying on friends with spare sofas when he is forced to shut up shop. Until one day, the world learns that he has in his possession the last filmed recordings of Alex Bleach, starting a man hunt.
Pretending is Lying by Dominique Goblet, translated by Sophie Yanow and
published by New York Review Books. This beautiful memoir is a series of snapshots and fragments—skipping through time, and from raw, slashing color to delicate black and white— through which Goblet examines the most important relationships in her life: with her partner, her daughter, and with her parents.
The winner will be announced at the Translation Awards on February 13th.
Here is more information about the Translation Prizes. More specifically, the French Institute supports the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation from French into English.
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