Three Percent: Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Winner Announced

Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Winner Announced

16 June 14 | Kaija Straumanis

The winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2014 is Susan Wicks for her translation of Valérie Rouzeau’s Talking Vrouz (Arc publications).

From the judges:

“Talking Vrouz is a wonderfully inventive and yet faithful translation of poems which are already at an oblique angle to their own language (French). Susan Wicks renders a unique poetic voice, with all its eccentricities and privacies, into a matching English. The translation is exact, inventive and full of life, and offers readers something new and startling in English poetry.”

The Prize was awarded at an event at St Anne’s College Oxford, at which the shortlisted translators read from and discussed their work. This was the crowning event of Oxford Translation Day, a festival or talks, readings and workshops staged in collaboration with Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation, English PEN, the Poetry Translation Centre, the Oxford German Network, the East Oxford Community Classics Centre and the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities.

The Oxford–Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. It is funded by Lord Weidenfeld and by New College, The Queen’s College and St Anne’s College, Oxford.

For the rest of this year’s shortlist, go here. For more information on the prize itself, go here.

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