Helen & Kurt Wolff
Translator's Prize

Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize updated

We are delighted to announce the 2024 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. Established in 1996 and newly funded by the Friends of Goethe New York, the Prize honors an outstanding literary translation from German into English published in the USA the previous year. The prizewinning translator receives $5,000 as well as a fully funded trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair.
 

How to submit?


The 2024 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize is now open for submissions. Please complete our Online Submission Form in order to submit a book. The deadline for submitting a completed application is March 31, 2024. 

Publishers in the USA and Canada are invited to submit five 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 2023.
 

Past Prizewinners

Vincent Kling © Vincent Kling

2022
Vincent Kling


Jackie Smith © Patrick Bennett

2021
Jackie Smith

Jackie Smith received the 2021 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for her translation of Judith Schalansky's An Inventory of Losses.

Publisher: New Directions, 2020




25 Years Wolff Prize

Shelley Frisch, jury chair of the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, reflects on the 25 year history of the prize in 2021, its significance to literature in translation, and its role in honoring the Wolff family’s extraordinary legacy in publishing.



Alexander Wolff, grandson of Kurt Wolff and author of Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home, elucidates his grandfather's perennial undertaking to establish himself as a publisher on both sides of the Atlantic.

About Helen & 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.

Contact

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

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

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