Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator´s Prize

Established in 1996 and funded by the German government, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize is awarded each year to honor an outstanding literary translation from German into English published in the USA the previous year. The prizewinning translator receives $10,000.

How to submit?
Past Prizewinners
About Helen and Kurt Wolff
Contact
Our Partners

Video on How to Apply

How to submit?

Publishers in the USA and Canada are invited to submit six copies of a published translation from the German language into English for consideration. The translation must have been published (not only distributed) in the USA or Canada in 2020.

Guidelines for Publishers

Submit now!

Entries may be fiction or non-fiction and may include: novels, novellas, short stories, plays, poetry, biographies, essays and correspondences. The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2021.

Online-Formular

Past Prizewinners

Prize Winner 2020: Philip Boehm

Philip Boehm received the 2020 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Christine Wunnicke's The Fox and Dr. Shimamura.

Publisher: New Directions, 2019

Boehm’s sensitive and versatile translation, making admirable choices of both tone and vocabulary throughout, captures all the sparkle and slanting energy of this fresh, original, and very modern novel.

Wolff Prize Talk 2020

On May 9, 2020 we hosted Translating Unconventional Narratives: A Conversation with 2020 Wolff Prizewinner Philip Boehm, a special online conversation between Philip Boehm and jury chairwoman Dr. Shelley Frisch. You can watch a recording of the talk on either this page or our YouTube channel.

2019
Damion Searls

Damion Searls received the 2019 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl.

Publisher: New York Review Books, 2018

2018
Isabel Fargo Cole

Isabel Fargo Cole received the 2018 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for her translation of Wolfgang Hilbig's Old Rendering Plant.

Publisher: Two Lines Press, 2017

2017
Charlotte Collins

Charlotte Collins received the 2017 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for her translation of Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016

2016
Daniel Bowles

Past Recipients from 1996

About Helen and Kurt Wolff

Kurt Wolff, joined later by his wife Helen, was one of the most outstanding and innovative publishers in Germany of the 1920s. Helen and Kurt Wolff immigrated to New York in 1941, and founded Pantheon Books, a publishing house devoted mainly to the translation of German and other European literature.

About Helen & Kurt Wolff

Contact

Dean Whiteside
Translation Grant Program Liaison
dean.whiteside@goethe.de

Goethe-Institut New York
30 Irving Place
New York, NY 10003

Our Partners

Translation Grant Program

The Goethe-Institut’s grant program “Translations of German Books into Other Languages” supports non-German publishers in publishing German-language literature, with the aim of making accessible to non-German speaking readers current works of contemporary literature, literature for children and young people, important academic titles and non-fiction works.

Gutekunst Prize

The Gutekunst Prize of the Friends of Goethe New York is open to college students and to all translators under the age of 35 who, at the time the prize is awarded, have not yet published, nor are under contract for, a book-length translation.