Past winners

The following is a comprehensive list of past recipients of the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize. Descriptions courtesy of the publishers.


36th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2023)

FICTION

Juliet Sutcliffe, for her translation of The Music Game by Stéfanie Clermont (Biblioasis)

Friends since grade school, Céline, Julie, and Sabrina come of age at the start of a new millennium, supporting each other and drifting apart as their lives pull them in different directions. But when their friend dies by suicide in the abandoned city lot where they once gathered, they must carry on in the world that left him behind—one they once dreamed they would change for the better. […] An ode to friendship and the ties that bind us together, Stéfanie Clermont’s award-winning The Music Game confronts the violence of the modern world and pays homage to those who work in the hope and faith that it can still be made a better place.

NONFICTION

Kieran Aarons and Cédrine Michel, for their co-translation of Self Defense: A Philosophy of Violence by Elsa Dorlin (Verso Books)

Is violent self-defense ethical? In the history of colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, there has long been a dividing line between bodies “worthy of defending” and those who have been disarmed and rendered defenseless. […] Here, philosopher Elsa Dorlin looks across the global history of the left – from slave revolts to the knitting women of the French Revolution and British suffragists’ training in ju-jitsu, from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the Black Panther Party, from queer neighborhood patrols to Black Lives Matter – to trace the politics, philosophy, and ethics of self defense. In this history she finds a “martial ethics of the self”: a practice in which violent self defense is the only means for the oppressed to ensure survival and to build a liveable future.


35th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2022)

FICTION

Lara Vergnaud, for her translation of Life Sciences by Joy Sorman (Restless Books)

Joy Sorman’s Life Sciences takes an overtly political premise—the medical establishment’s inability or perhaps refusal to take seriously the physical struggles of women—and transforms it into a surreal and knife-deep work of fiction that asks: What pain can we abide, and what pain must we fight back against, even if the fight hurts more than the disease itself?… Translated by Lara Vergnaud into prose that is both deceptively simple and playfully archaic, Sorman’s story [is] among the first to tackle illness as metaphor, as birthright and as feminist rebellion…. Sorman’s alternative history of female malady offers both a horrific dose of truth and a comforting alternative to the stories sick women have told ourselves since time began.

NONFICTION

The nonfiction prize was split between two winners.

Susan Emanuel, for both her translation of The Belle Époque by Dominique Kalifa (Columbia University Press)

The years before the First World War have long been romanticized as a zenith of French culture—the “Belle Époque.” The era is seen as the height of a lost way of life that remains emblematic of what it means to be French. […] This book traces the making—and the imagining—of the Belle Époque to reveal how and why it became a cultural myth. Dominique Kalifa lifts the veil on a period shrouded in nostalgia, explaining the century-long need to continuously reinvent and even sanctify this moment. He sifts through images handed down in memoirs and reminiscences, literature and film, art and history to explore the many facets of the era, including its worldwide reception. The Belle Époque was born in France, but it quickly went global as other countries adopted the concept to write their own histories. In shedding light on how the Belle Époque has been celebrated and reimagined, Kalifa also offers a nuanced meditation on time, history, and memory.

and Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934–1945 by Catherine Collomp (Wayne State University Press)

Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934–1945 is the English translation of Catherine Collomp’s award-winning book on the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). Formed in New York City in 1934 by the leaders of the Jewish Labor Movement, the JLC came to the forefront of American labor’s reaction to Nazism and antisemitism. Situated at the crossroads of several fields of inquiry—Jewish history, immigration and exile studies, American and international labor history, World War II in France and in Poland—the history of the JLC is by nature transnational. It brings to the fore the strength of ties between the Yiddish-speaking Jewish worlds across the globe.

Sophie R. Lewis, for her translation of In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin (New York Review Books)

In the Eye of the Wild begins with an account of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s near fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear in the mountains of Siberia. Martin’s professional interest is animism; she addresses philosophical questions about the relation of humankind to nature, and in her work she seeks to partake as fully as she can in the lives of the indigenous peoples she studies. Her violent encounter with the bear, however, brings her face-to-face with something entirely beyond her ken—the untamed, the nonhuman, the animal, the wild. In the course of that encounter something in the balance of her world shifts. A change takes place that she must somehow reckon with. […] In the Eye of the Wild is a fascinating, mind-altering book about terror, pain, endurance, and self-transformation, comparable in its intensity of perception and originality of style to J. A. Baker’s classic The Peregrine. Here Nastassja Martin takes us to the farthest limits of human being.


34th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2021)

FICTION

Chris Andrews, for his translation of Our Riches by Kaouther Adimi (New Directions Publishing)

Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto “by the young, for the young,” discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties (he was hopelessly generous) and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot (often compared to the legendary bookseller Sylvia Beach) carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers.

Our Riches interweaves Charlot’s story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad (dispatched in 2017 to empty the old shop and repaint it). Ryad’s no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop’s self-appointed, early illiterate guardian, opens the young man’s mind. Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it’s a hymn to the book and to the love of books.

NONFICTION

Hoyt Rogers, for his translation of Rome, 1630: The Horizon of the Early Baroque, Followed by Five Essays on Seventeenth-Century Art by Yves Bonnefoy (Seagull Books, University of Chicago Press)

Bernini, Poussin, Velázquez, Cortona, Borromini, Valentin: the list could go on and on. In 1630, despite their signal differences, the finest artists of the European Baroque converged on Rome, where Caravaggio was still a lingering influence. In response to the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church turned to masters such as these to celebrate the glories of heaven, while other patrons granted them commissions for secular works. With splendid monuments like Bernini’s Baldachin at St Peter’s, or profound canvases like the landscapes of Poussin, Rome became the crucible of major advances in seventeenth-century sculpture, painting and architecture.

In the title study of this book, Yves Bonnefoy focuses on the pivotal year in the development of the Baroque style. Richly illustrated, his Rome, 1630 reveals how a pan-European movement was born from the achievements of the Italian and foreign artists who congregated in the city during that seminal period. The five supplementary essays in the volume further explore the evolution of seventeenth-century painting, particularly in the works of Elsheimer, Caravaggio, Cortona and Poussin. In his afterword, Hoyt Rogers pays homage to the author, analyzing the centrality of Baroque art to Bonnefoy’s poetry and aesthetics.



33rd Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2020)

FICTION

Alyson Waters, for her translation of A King Alone by Jean Giono (New York Review Books)

A King Alone is set in a remote Alpine village that is cut off from the world by rugged mountains and by long months when the ground is covered with snow and the heavens with cloud. One such winter, villagers begin mysteriously to disappear. Soon the village is paralyzed by terror, which gives way to relief and eager anticipation when the outsider Langlois arrives to investigate. What he discovers, however, will leave no one reassured, and his reappearance in the village a few years later, now assigned the task of guarding it from wolves, awakens those troubling memories. A man of few words, a regal manner, and military efficiency, Langlois baffles and fascinates the villagers, whose different responses to him shape Jean Giono’s increasingly charged narrative. This novel about a tiny community at the dangerous edge of things and a man of law who is a man alone could be described as a metaphysical Western. It unfolds with the uncanny inevitability and disturbing intensity of a dream.

NONFICTION

Michael Loriaux and Jacob Levi, for their co-translation of “Murderous Consent: on the Accommodation of Violent Death” by Marc Crépon (Fordham University Press)

Murderous Consent details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it’s classically understood. Marc Crépon insists on a bond between ethics and politics and attributes violence to our treatment of the two as separate spheres. We repeatedly resist the call to responsibility, as expressed by the appeal—by peoples across the world—for the care and attention that their vulnerability enjoins.
Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, Crépon calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. Not just a work of philosophy but an engagement with life as it’s lived, Murderous Consent works to redefine our global obligations, articulating anew what humanitarianism demands and what an ethically grounded political resistance might mean.


32nd Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2019)

FICTION

The fiction prize was split between two winners.

Linda Coverdale, for her translation of Slave Old Man by Patrick Chamoiseau (The New Press)

From one of the most innovative and subversive novelists writing in French, a “writer of exceptional and original gifts” (The New York Times), whose Texaco won the Prix Goncourt and has been translated into fourteen languages, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly slave’s daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his master and a fearsome hound on his heels. Chamoiseau’s exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the Creole culture of early nineteenth-century Martinique and brilliantly translated by Linda Coverdale, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.

Chris Clarke, for his translation of Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob (Wakefield Press)

Imaginary Lives remains, over 120 years since its original publication in French, one of the secret keys to modern literature: under-recognized, yet a decisive influence on such writers as Apollinaire, Borges, Jarry and Artaud, and more contemporary authors such as Roberto Bolaño and Jean Echenoz. Drawing from historical influences such as Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius, and authors more contemporary to him such as Thomas De Quincey and Walter Pater, Schwob established the genre of fictional biography with this collection: a form of narrative that championed the specificity of the individual over the generality of history, and the memorable detail of a vice over the forgettable banality of a virtue. These 22 portraits present figures drawn from the margins of history, from Empedocles the “Supposed God” and Clodia the “Licentious Matron” to the pirate Captain Kidd and the Scottish murderers Messrs. Burke and Hare.

NONFICTION

Malcolm Debevoise, for his translation of Good Government by Pierre Rosanvallon (Harvard University Press)

Few would disagree that Western democracies are experiencing a crisis of representation. In Good Government, Pierre Rosanvallon examines the long history of the alternative to which the public has gravitated: the empowered executive. Rosanvallon argues that, faced with everyday ineptitude in governance, people become attracted to strong leaders and bold executive action. If these fail, they too often want even stronger personal leadership. Whereas nineteenth-century liberals and reformers longed for parliamentary sovereignty, nowadays few contest the “imperial presidency.” Rosanvallon traces this history from the Weimar Republic to Charles De Gaulle’s “exceptional” presidency to the Bush–Cheney concentration of executive power. Europeans rebelling against the technocratic EU and Americans fed up with the “administrative state” have turned to charismatic figures, from Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán, who tout personal strength as their greatest asset. This is not just a right-wing phenomenon, though, as liberal contentment with Obama’s drone war demonstrates.


31st Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2018)

FICTION

The fiction prize was split between two winners.

Paul Eprile, for his translation of Melville: A Novel by Jean Giono (New York Review Books)

In the fall of 1849, Herman Melville traveled to London to deliver his novel White-Jacket to his publisher. On his return to America, Melville would write Moby-Dick. Melville: A Novel imagines what happened in between: the adventurous writer fleeing London for the country, wrestling with an angel, falling in love with an Irish nationalist, and, finally, meeting the angel’s challenge—to express man’s fate by writing the novel that would become his masterpiece.

Eighty years after it appeared in English, Moby-Dick was translated into French for the first time by the Provençal novelist Jean Giono and his friend Lucien Jacques. The publisher persuaded Giono to write a preface, granting him unusual latitude. The result was this literary essai, Melville: A Novel—part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. Paul Eprile’s expressive translation of this intimate homage brings the exchange full circle.

Howard Curtis, for his translation of The Principle by Jérôme Ferrari (Europa Editions)

Beguiled by the figure of German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who disrupted the assumptions of quantum mechanics with his notorious Uncertainty Principle, earning him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1932, a young, disenchanted philosopher attempts to right his own intellectual and emotional course and take the measure of the evil at work in the contemporary world.

In this critically acclaimed novel, Jérôme Ferrari takes stock of European culture’s failings during the 20th century and inserts their implications into a compelling vision of the contemporary world. His story is one of eternal returns, of a perpetual fall of Icarus—the inevitably compromised meeting between a man’s soul and the mysterious beauty of the world.

NONFICTION

The nonfiction prize was split between two winners.

Samuel E. Martin, for his translation of Bark by Georges-Didi Huberman (MIT Press)

On a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Georges Didi-Huberman tears three pieces of bark from birch trees on the edge of the site. Looking at these pieces after his return home, he sees them as letters, a flood, a path, time, memory, flesh. The bark serves as a springboard to Didi-Huberman’s meditations on his visit, recorded in this spare, poetic, and powerful book. Bark is a personal account, drawing not on the theoretical apparatus of scholarship but on Didi-Huberman’s own history, memory, and knowledge.

The text proceeds as a series of reflections, accompanied by Didi-Huberman’s photographs of the visit. The photographs are not meant to be art—Didi-Huberman confesses that he “photographed practically everything without looking”—but approach it nevertheless. Didi-Huberman tells us that his grandparents died at Auschwitz, but his account is more universal than biographical. As he walks from place to place, he observes that in German birches are birken; Birkenau designates the meadow where the birches grow. Didi-Huberman sees and photographs the “reconstructed” execution wall; the floors of the crematorium, forgotten witnesses to killing; and the birch trees, lovely but also resembling prison bars. Taking his own photographs, he thinks of the famous photographs taken in 1944 by a member of the Sonderkommando, the only photographic documentation of the camp before the Germans destroyed it, hoping to hide the evidence of their crimes. Didi-Huberman notices a “bizarre proliferation of white flowers on the exact spot of the cremation pits.” The dead are not departed.

Alison L. Strayer, for her translation of The Years by Annie Ernaux (Seven Stories Press)

The Years is a personal narrative from Annie Ernaux of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written” by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I” for the “we” (or “they,” or “one”) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents’ generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents’ generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the ‘we’ and impersonal pronouns.”


30th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2017)

FICTION

Sam Taylor, for his translation of The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

The Heart (2016)

Just before dawn on a Sunday morning, three teenage boys go surfing. While driving home exhausted, the boys are involved in a fatal car accident on a deserted road. Two of the boys are wearing seat belts; one goes through the windshield. The doctors declare him brain-dead shortly after arriving at the hospital, but his heart is still beating.

The Heart takes place over the twenty-four hours surrounding the resulting heart transplant, as life is taken from a young man and given to a woman close to death. In gorgeous, ruminative prose, it examines the deepest feelings of everyone involved as they navigate decisions of life and death.

As stylistically audacious as it is emotionally explosive, The Heart mesmerized readers in France, where it has been hailed as the breakthrough work of a new literary star.

Read an Interview with Sam Taylor

NONFICTION

The nonfiction prize was split between two winners.

Jane Marie Todd, for her translation of The French Resistance by Olivier Wieviorka (Harvard University Press)

The French Resistance (2016)Olivier Wieviorka presents a comprehensive history of the French Resistance, synthesizing its social, political, and military aspects to offer fresh insights into its operation. Detailing the Resistance from the inside out, he reveals not one organization but many interlocking groups often at odds over goals, methods, and leadership. He debunks lingering myths, including the idea that the Resistance sprang up in response to the exhortations of de Gaulle’s Free French government-in-exile.

The Resistance was homegrown, arising from the soil of French civil society. Resisters had to improvise in the fight against the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy regime. They had no blueprint to follow, but resisters from all walks of life and across the political spectrum formed networks, organizing activities from printing newspapers to rescuing downed airmen to sabotage. Although the Resistance was never strong enough to fight the Germans openly, it provided the Allies invaluable intelligence, sowed havoc behind enemy lines on D-Day, and played a key role in Paris’s liberation.

Wieviorka shatters the conventional image of a united resistance with no interest in political power. But setting the record straight does not tarnish the legacy of its fighters, who braved Nazism without blinking.

Read an Interview with Jane Marie Todd

Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell, for their co-translation of Jean Cocteau: A Life by Claude Arnaud (Yale University Press)

Jean Cocteau (2016)Unevenly respected, easily hated, almost always suspected of being inferior to his reputation, Jean Cocteau has often been thought of as a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. In this landmark biography, Claude Arnaud thoroughly contests this characterization, as he celebrates Cocteau’s “fragile genius—a combination almost unlivable in art” but in his case so fertile.

Arnaud narrates the life of this legendary French novelist, poet, playwright, director, filmmaker, and designer who, as a young man, pretended to be a sort of a god, but who died as a humble and exhausted craftsman. His moving and compassionate account examines the nature of Cocteau’s chameleon-like genius, his romantic attachments, his controversial politics, and his intimate involvement with many of the century’s leading artistic lights, including Picasso, Proust, Hemingway, Stravinsky, and Tennessee Williams. Already published to great critical acclaim in France, Arnaud’s penetrating and deeply researched work reveals a uniquely gifted artist while offering a magnificent cultural history of the twentieth century.

Read an Interview with Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell


 

29th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2016)

FICTION

Christine Donougher, for her translation of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (Penguin Classics / Penguin Random House)

NONFICTION

The nonfiction prize was split between two winners.

Malcolm DeBevoise, for his translation of Birth of a Theorem by Cédric Villani (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Steven Rendall, for his translation of Bonaparte: 1769-1802 by Patrice Gueniffey (Harvard University Press)

Learn more about the 29th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony


28th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2015)

FICTION

Mad and Bad (2014)Donald Nicholson-Smith, for his translation of The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette (New York Review Books)

 

NONFICTION

Dark Years (2014)David Ball, for his translation of Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944 by Jean Guéhenno (Oxford University Press)

 

Learn more about the 28th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony


27th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2014)

FICTION

Electrico W (2013)Adriana Hunter, for her translation of Eléctrico W by Hervé Le Tellier (Other Press)

Eléctrico W // By the celebrated Oulipo writer, this brilliant and witty novel set in Lisbon explores love, relationships, and the strange balance between literature and life. Journalist, writer, and translator Vincent Balmer moves to Lisbon to escape a failing affair.
During his first assignment there, he teams up with Antonio — a photographer who has just returned to the city after a ten-year absence — to report for a French newspaper on an infamous serial killer’s trial. Eléctrico W recounts their nine days together and the adventures that proliferate to form a constellation of successive ephemeral connections and relationships.

Read an Interview with Adriana Hunter

NONFICTION

Falling Sky (2013)Alison Dundy and Nicholas Elliott, for their co-translation of The Falling Sky by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (Harvard University Press)

The Falling Sky is a remarkable first-person account of the life story and cosmo-ecological thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon. Representing a people whose very existence is in jeopardy, Davi Kopenawa paints an unforgettable picture of Yanomami culture, past and present, in the heart of the rainforest — a world where ancient indigenous knowledge and shamanic traditions cope with the global geopolitics of an insatiable natural resources-extraction industry. Bruce Albert, a close friend since the 1970s, superbly captures Kopenawa’s intense, poetic voice.

Read an Interview with Alison Dundy

Learn more about the 27th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony


26th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2013)

FICTION

Prehistoric Times (2012)

Alyson Waters, for her translation of Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard (Archipelago Books)

NONFICTION

The Metamorphosis of KinshipNora Scott, for her translation of The Metamorphoses of Kinship by Maurice Godelier (Verso Books)

 

 

 

Learn more about the 26th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony


25th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2012)

The prize was split between three winners.

Marina Harss, for her translation of The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter by Elisabeth Gille (New York Review Books)

 

 

 

 

 

 Arthur Goldhammer, for his translation of  The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville (Cambridge University Press)

 

 

 

Read an interview with Arthur Goldhammer

Richard Howard, for his translation of When the World Spoke French by Marc Fumaroli (New York Review Books)

 

 


24th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2011)

FICTION

The fiction prize was split between two winners.

Mitzi Angel, for her translation of 03 by Jean-Christophe Valtat (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

 

 

 

 

 

Lydia Davis, for her translation of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Viking/Penguin Group)

NONFICTION

The nonfiction prize was split between two winners.

Frederick Brown, for his translation of Letters from America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Yale University Press)

 

 

 

 

 

Jane Marie Todd, for her translation of Reading and Writing in Babylon by Dominique Charpin (Harvard University Press)

Read an Interview with Jane Marie Todd


23rd Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2010)

John Cullen, for his translation of Brodeck by Philippe Claudel (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

 

 

 

 


22nd Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2009)

FICTION

Jody Gladding & Elizabeth Deshays, for their co-translation of Small Lives by Pierre Michon (Archipelago Books)

 

NONFICTION

Matthew Cobb & Malcolm DeBevoise, for their co-translation of Life Explained by Michel Morange (Yale University Press/Odile Jacob)

 

 

 


21st Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2008)

FICTION

Linda Coverdale, for her translation of Ravel by Jean Echenoz (The New Press)

 

NONFICTION

Linda Asher, for her translation of The Curtain by Milan Kundera (HarperCollins)

 

 

 

 


20th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2007)

FICTION

Sandra Smith, for her translation of Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (Alfred A. Knopf Publishers)

NONFICTION

Bruce Fink, for his translation of Écrits by Jaques Lacan (Norton)

 

 

 

 


19th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2006)

FICTION

Daniel Weissbort, for his translation of Missing Person by Patrick Modiano (David Godine)

 

NONFICTION

Sharon Bowman, for her translation of The American Enemy: the History of French Anti-Americanism by Philippe Roger (University of Chicago Press)

 

 

 


18th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2005)

FICTION

Helen Marx, for her translation of Silbermann by Jacques de Lacretelle (Helen Marx Books)

NONFICTION

Arthur Goldhammer, for his translation of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (The Library of America)

Read an interview with Arthur Goldhammer


17th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2004)

FICTION

Lydia Davis, for her translation of Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (Viking Press)

NONFICTION

Janet Lloyd, for her translation of The Writing of Orpheus by Marcel Detienne (Johns Hopkins University Press)

 

 


16th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2003)

FICTION

The fiction prize was split between two winners.

Jeff Fort, for his translation of Aminadab by Maurice Blanchot (University of Nebraska Press)

 

James Hogarth, for his translation of The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo (Modern Library)

 

NONFICTION

Anthony Roberts, for his translation of Jihad by Gilles Kepel (Harvard University Press)

 

 

 

 


15th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2001)

Jordan Stump, for his translation of The Jardin des Plantes by Claude Simon (Northwestern University Press)

 

 


14th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 2000)

Linda Asher, for her translation of The Case of Dr. Sachs by Martin Winckler (Seven Stories Press)

 


13th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1999)

Richard Howard, for his translation of The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal (Random House)

 

 

 

 

 

 


12th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1998)

Madeleine Velguth, for her translation of Children of Clay by Raymond Queneau (Sun & Moon Press)

 

 

 

 

 

 


11th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1997)

The prize was split between two winners.

Linda Coverdale, for her translation of Literature or Life by Jorge Semprun (Viking Penguin)

 

 

 

 

 

Barbara Wright, for her translation of Here by Nathalie Sarraute (George Braziller)

 

 

 

 

 

 


10th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1996)

Arthur Goldhammer, for his translation of Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol.1 by Pierre Nora (Columbia University Press)

 

 

Read an interview with Arthur Goldhammer


9th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1994)

Joachim Neugroschel, for his translation of With Downcast Eyes by Tahar Ben Jelloun (Little Brown & Co.)

 

 

 

 

 

 


8th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1993)

Nina Rootes, for her translation of Sky Memoirs by Blaise Cendrars (Paragon House)

 


7th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1992)

Lydia Davis, for her translation of Rules of the Game I: Scratches by Michel Leiris (Paragon House)

 

 

 

 

 

 


6th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1991)

Burton Raffel, for his translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (Norton)

 

 

 

 

 


5th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1990)

Arthur Goldhammer, for his translation of A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution by François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)

Read an interview with Arthur Goldhammer


4th Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1989)

Franklin Philip, for his translation of The Statue Within by François Jacob (Basic Books)

 

 

 

 

 


3rd Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1988)

David Bellos, for his translation of Life, a User’s Manual by Georges Perec (David Godine Publishers)

 

Read an interview with David Bellos

 


2nd Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1987)

Richard Howard, for his translation of William Marshal, the Flowering of Chivalry by Georges Duby (Pantheon Books)

 

 

 

 

 

 


1st Annual Translation Prize
(Awarded in 1986)

Barbara Bray, for her translation of The Writing of Stones by Roger Callois (University of Virginia Press)