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!

BTBA Shortlists

Three books translated from German have made the fiction and poetry shortlists for the Best Translated Book Award:

Elfriede Czurda: Almost 1 Book, Almost 1 Life, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop

Herta Müller: The Hunger Angel, trans. Philip Boehm

Urs Widmer: My Father's Book, trans. Donal McLaughlin

Woo!

None on the Impac Prize or the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlists, but hey. Lots of other good books out there.

Michael Kleeberg & Other Awards

Rejoice, you English-speaking peoples, for you may now read Michael Kleeberg's hair-raising and exhilarating story, The Communist of Montmartre, on Words Without Borders. Translated by David Dollenmayer, the winner of this year's Wolff Translation Prize.
This is one of those do not pass go, do not collect 200 pounds kind of stories, people. You have to read it right now. This month's Words Without Borders is dedicated to revolutions and revolutionaries, and it sort of fits in and sort of doesn't. But I don't want to give too much away - just go ahead and read it. You should also be able to get hold of Dollenmayer's translation of Kleeberg's novel The King of Corsica, a "modern classic where history, philosophy, and eroticism collide in the grand tradition of the 18th-century novel."

Kleeberg himself translates from French and English and lives in Berlin - when he's not being writer-in-residence in Mainz, that is. Just yesterday, he was presented with Hamburg's Irmgard Heilmann Award for his latest novel Karlmann, an "anthology of masculinity" set firmly in the 1980s. He can add it to his well-stocked cabinet of twelve literary prizes and top up his bank account by €7500.

Speaking of awards, Rosmarie Waldrop recently got the $3000 US PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Ulf Stolterfoht's Lingos I-IX. Stolterfoht has actually been translated various times; if you're interested, look him up at no man's land for links.

Compared to the above, Marcel Beyer is raking it in. He just won Germany's richest purse for writers, the Jospeh Breitenbach Prize (fifty thousand euros). True to my promise to provide biased and unprofessional reports, I won't bother with any links because his novel Kaltenburg made me fall asleep.