Logo Goethe-Institut

USA

Shortlist 2025
 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize

hkwolff sq

Jury Statement

We are delighted to announce this year’s shortlist for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. Ours is a challenging era, rocked daily by global, national, and local crises. Many of us find that turning to books, even those firmly based in reality, can enable us to find respite from, more effectively engage with, or move beyond quotidian dilemmas.

This year’s shortlist, selected from the eighteen German-to-English translations published in the United States or Canada in 2024 that were submitted for the Wolff Prize, comprises three translations of extraordinary merit: Tess Lewis’s translation of Lutz Seiler’s Star 111, Paul Reitter’s translation of Karl Marx’s Capital, and Nick Somers’s translation of Ines Geipel’s Behind the Wall.

This trio of shortlisted texts impressively displays the power of words, from three distinct perspectives, even though two of them—one a memoir, and the other a work of fiction, both appearing in English for the first time—focus on the German Democratic Republic; the third, a new translation of a nineteenth-century study of political economy, came to shake and shape the world. All three translations are marked by inspired word choices make their texts come alive in their new linguistic garb.

We congratulate translators Tess Lewis, Paul Reitter, and Nick Somers on their stellar achievements, and invite readers to delve into the intriguing and engaging works they have recreated.

Shelley Frisch
Princeton, New Jersey
April 2025
 

For her translation of Lutz Seiler's Star 111 (New York Review Books, 2024)

Tess Lewis

Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Walter Benjamin, Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, and Montaigne. A Guggenheim, NEA and Berlin Prize Fellow, she won the 2017 PEN Award for Translation for Maja Haderlap’s Angel of Oblivion. She is an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and curator of the Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s only German language literature festival. 

Tess Lewis © Sarah Shatz © Sarah Shatz

For his translation of Karl Marx's Capital (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Paul Reitter

Paul Reitter received his PhD in German studies from the University of California, Berkeley. For more than twenty years, he has taught in the German department at Ohio State University, where he served as the director of the humanities institute from 2012 to 2018. He writes mainly about German-Jewish culture, the history of the humanities, and translation, and in his own translation projects he has focused on retranslating and reframing texts that deliver philosophical critique and social criticism in enduringly exciting ways. His work has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and the Guggenheim Foundation.
 

Paul Reitter © Emory Klann © Emory Klann

For his translation of Ines Geipel's Beyond the Wall (Polity Press, 2024)

Nick Somers

Nick Somers was born in Liverpool, UK, in 1949 and studied American History at Sussex University. He lives in Vienna and has been a freelance translator since 1988, specializing in twentieth-century history, art, and culture. He has translated a dozen or so books, including Alwin Meyer's Never Forget Your Name: The Children of Auschwitz about child inmates of Auschwitz, Sigmund Freud–Anna Freud: Correspondence, and most recently Behind the Wall and Beautiful New Sky by Ines Geipel about East Germany. He works regularly for the Jewish Museum, Belvedere, and Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, among other institutions, translating catalogues, exhibition texts, and audio guides.

Nick Somers