German Poets and Prizes

The dam has broken and prizes are going to poets! Following Jan Wagner's surprising receipt of the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair after everyone thought even nominating a poet was an act of iconoclastic tokenism, they've gone and done it again. This time it's the Kleist Prize for Monika Rinck. Rinck has published mainly poetry and essays but also some rather odd other things, and you can find quite a lot of her poems in Nicolas Grindell's English translations at no man's land if you click on the first link above.

The Kleist Prize is an interesting one because it's awarded by a different individual every year, to all kinds of writers for their entire work. I kind of like the idea because it means there are no compromises. This year it was the president of the German Academy of Language and Literature, Heinrich Detering, who chose to bestow a big fat €20,000 on Rinck. Hooray!

And then – perhaps less surprisingly – there's another German poet on the poetry shortlist for the Best Translated Book Award: Farhad Showghi for End of the City Map, tr. Rosmarie Waldrop. The winners are announced on 27 May.

Incidentally, Jan Wagner's Regentonnenvariationen made it to number 5 on the Spiegel bestseller list after he won the Leipzig prize and spent several weeks in the charts. That hasn't happened to a poet before; not even Tranströmer after he won the Nobel.

Erpenbeck/Bernofsky, Kehlmann/Brown Janeway Shortlisted, Brambach/Kinsky, Showghi/Waldrop Longlisted

Lists! The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist is out, and features Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days, translated by Susan Bernofsky, and Daniel Kehlmann's F, translated by Carol Brown Janeway. Guess which one's my favourite?

And also the American sort of equivalent, the Best Translated Book Award, has announced its longlists. No German writing on the fiction list, but two titles on the poetry longlist (if anyone runs a blog called Love French Books, they'll be really pleased about both lists, though): Collected Poems by Rainer Brambach, translated by Esther Kinsky, and End of the City Map by Farhad Showghi, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop.

Congratulations to all the nominees!