The jury, comprised of Tess Lewis, book critic and translator, Alta Price, translator, and Jeremy Davies, executive editor at Coffee House Press, stated:
"The 2025 Gutekunst Prize jury unanimously and enthusiastically commends Juliane Scholtz for a flexible and dexterous translation of a passage from Judith Kuckart’s auto-fictional novel Die Welt zwischen den Nachrichten ("The World Between the News").
The linguistic hurdles and traps in this year’s selected excerpt were formidable. Kuckart’s style is slightly slant to conventional German and her prose—idiosyncratic, variable, and varied—reflects her retrospective view of her world and her history. Memory here is unreliable and so is language.
Capturing the shifts in tone and register in the narrator’s voice is no easy task and Juliane Scholtz rises to the challenge inventively. She brings to the translation an imaginative and linguistic distance from the original that preserves a sense of the narrator’s character. She chooses words that are vivid and apt in their specificity, deftly recreating the atmosphere of the original. Juliane clearly has an intuitive sense of narrative and language that is hard to teach, a keen eye for the telling detail, and a sharp ear for colloquial rhythms."
You can read Juliane Scholtz's prizewinning translation of an excerpt from Judith Kuckart’s
Die Welt zwischen den Nachrichten:
