Kruso named runner-up for Schlegel-Tieck Prize

On February 13, the Society of Authors named Kruso runner-up for the 2018 Schlegel-Tieck Prize, awarded annually for a translation from German.

From the TLS

Kruso is a novel steeped in locality – there are numerous references to the Naturalist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, who holidayed on Hiddensee and was buried on the island – but an important work, too, in its chronicling of the final days of communism in East Germany. Tess Lewis’s excellent translation is runner-up for the Schlegel-Tieck.

Trafika Europe Swiss Literature Issue released

Edited by Tess Lewis, Swiss Delights presents works by 12 of Switzerland's most engaging and intriguing contemporary writers.
Presenting Michael Fehr, Max Lobe, Leta Semadeni, Ilma Rakusa, Odile Cornuz, Michel Layaz, Klaus Merz, Noëlle Revaz, Mariella Mehr, Frédéric Pajak, Dana Grigorcea and Matteo Terzaghi.

Translations by Alta Price, Shaun Whiteside, Marc Vincenz, Roger Russi, and Tess Lewis

2017 PEN Translation Prize to Tess Lewis for her translation of Angel of Oblivion

From the judges' citation:

Maja Haderlap's Angel of Oblivion is a compelling novel that sheds important light on the little known history of Austria's Carinthian Slovene minority. Fluid and vigorous, Tess Lewis's translation captures Haderlap's elegant balancing of the narrator's bucolic childhood, lyrically described, and the underlying trauma of the Second World War's ravages on the community.

2017 PEN Translation Prize

ACFNY sponsored 'Angel of Oblivion' Book tour

Maja Haderlap’s Angel of Oblivion is a groundbreaking novel based on the author’s own family story as part of the Slovenian-speaking minority in southern Austria and that community’s struggle against the Nazis during World War II. The novel was awarded several prestigious awards including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.

For her outstanding translation of a sample text, translator, editor, and literary critic Tess Lewis was presented the 2015 ACFNY Translation Prize.

Together with Archipelago Books, and in cooperation with other partners, the ACFNY is pleased to present the author and her translator on tour to New York City, Washington DC, and Boston during September and October 2016.

Information on individual readings and events

 

Austrian Literature Feature in Words Without Borders

Reverberations of History

In this month’s special feature, 2015 Guggenheim Fellow Tess Lewis translates and introduces a selection of contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama from Austria. Lewis writes: “Often lumped into the unwieldy category of German-language literature or overshadowed by Austria’s literary giants, many of its most interesting writers have yet to be translated into English. A country of eight million people, Austria has six official languages. A century ago, under the Hapsburg Empire, more than twice that many ethnic and linguistic groups were bound in a fruitful if sharp-elbowed co-existence and those creative tensions invigorate Austrian writing to this day.” In their distinct ways, these pieces are animated by the frictions that have energized Austrian literature for generations, from Joseph Roth and Robert Musil to the four writers featured here.
Maja Haderlap 2 poems
Karl-Markus Gauss
Alois Hotschnig
Antonio Fian

Interview with Trafika Europe

 

INTERVIEW

“The war is a devious fisher of men.” Check out this terrific audio interview with translator Tess Lewis. She shares insights from her work translating Swiss novelist Jean-Luc Benoziglio’s Privy Portrait from French (published by Seagull Books) and Slovenian Maja Haderlap’s novel Angel of Oblivion from German (due out from Archipelago Books). We discuss the role of humor in French culture, differences among the main varieties of German language, and the condition of the Slovenian minority (as well as migrants generally) in Austria through the present day. Includes Tess reading an excerpt from Angel of Oblivion, for which she has won the Austrian Cultural Forum’s 2015 Translation Prize.