Photo: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach Photo: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach

The annual Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize is awarded each spring to honor an outstanding literary translation from German into English published in the USA the previous year. The translator of the winning translation will receive US $10,000. The prize was established in 1996 and was administered by the Goethe-Institut Chicago until 2014. Funded by the German government, the Prize has been administered by the Goethe-Institut New York since 2015.

Guidelines for Publishers

American publishers are invited to submit six copies of a published translation from the German language into English to the following address:

Goethe-Institut New York
Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize
Attn: Walter Schlect
30 Irving Place
New York, NY 10003

The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2020. Please provide us with your contact information in the online submission form so that we may anticipate delivery of your submission and follow up with you as necessary.

The translation must have been published (not only distributed) in Canada or the US in 2019. Entries may be fiction or non-fiction and may include: novels, novellas, short stories, plays, poetry, biographies, essays and correspondences. Translators awarded the prize in the last seven years are disqualified from consideration this year.

All submitted titles will be listed on the Goethe-Institut website. A five-member jury will select a short list of 3 nominated titles in early April, with the winning translation to be announced by mid-April 2020.

The winning translator and publishing house will be invited to the award ceremony in New York, to take place in June 2020.

Contact:
Walter Schlect, Translation Grant Program Liaison
walter.schlect@goethe.de

Prizewinner 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

About the Prize

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

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

Daniel Bowles

Daniel Bowles received the 2016 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Christian Kracht's Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015
 

Year Recipients
2019 Damion Searls
for Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl von Uwe Johnson (New York Review Books)
2018 Isabel Fargo Cole
for Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang Hilbig (Two Lines Press)
2017 Charlotte Collins
for A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2016 Daniel Bowles
for Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas by Christian Kracht (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2015 Catherine Schelbert
for Flametti, or The Dandyism of the Poor by Hugo Ball (Wakefield Press)
2014 Shelley Frisch
for Kafka: The Years of Insight by Reiner Stach (Princeton University Press)
2013 Philip Boehm
for An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori (New York Review Books)
2012 Burton Pike
for Isle of the Dead by Gerhard Meier (Dalkey Archive Press)
2011 Jean M. Snook
for The Distand Sound by Gert Jonke (Dalkey Archive Press)
2010 Ross Benjamin
for Speak, Nabokov by Michael Maar (Verso)
2009 John Hargraves
for The Executor – A Comedy of Letters by Michael Krüger (Harcourt)
2008 David Dollenmeyer
for Childhood. An Autobiographical Fragment by Moses Rosenkranz (Syracuse University Press)
2007 Peter Constantine
for The Bird is a Raven by Benjamin Lebert (Knopf)
2006 Susan Bernofsky
for The Old Child & Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck (New Directions)
2005 Michael Henry Heim
for Death in Venus by Thomas Mann (Ecco)
2004 Breon Mitchell
for Morenga by Uwe Timm (New Directions)
2003 Margot Bettauer Dembo
for Summerhouse, later by Judith Hermann (Ecco)
2002 Anthea Bell
for Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (Random House)
2001 Krishna Winston
for Too Far Afield by Günter Grass (Harcourt)
2000 Michael Hofmann
for Rebellion by Joseph Roth (St. Martin's Press)
1999 Joel Agee
for Penthesilia by Heinrich von Kleist (HarperCollins)
1998 John Brownjohn
for Heroes Like Us by Thomas Brussig (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
1997 Leila Vennewitz
for Jacob the Liar by Jurek Becker (Arcade Publishing)
1996 John E. Woods
for The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (Knopf) and Nobodaddy's Children by Arno Schmidt (Dalkey Archive Press)
 
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. Herman Broch, Stefan George and Robert Musil were among the authors they published. In 1961 the couple joined the firm Harcourt Brace Jovanovich where they became co-publishers with their own imprint "Helen and Kurt Wolff Books". Kurt Wolff died on October 21, 1963. Upon her husband's death, Helen Wolff continued to work with authors on the Wolff list, expanding it to include Karl Jaspers, Walter Benjamin, Uwe Johnson, Günter Grass, Max Frisch, Jurek Becker, Hans Joachim Schädlich, and many others.

Helen Wolff was recognized for her work with an Inter Nationes Award, the Goethe-Medaille, and honorary doctorates from Mount Holyoke, Smith College and Dartmouth College. In 1994 she was awarded the Friedrich Gundolf Prize by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (German Academy for Language and Literature) for her promotion of German culture in the USA, and for making German literature accessible to American readers. Helen Wolff died on March 28, 1994.
Top