Nelly Sachs's Collected Poems Win the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation
News25.11.2024
This year’s Warwick Prize for Women in Translation has been awarded to the collection Revelation Freshly Erupting by Nelly Sachs, translated by Andrew Shanks and published by Carcanet Press.
Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) was a Jewish poet and playwright. Born in Berlin, she fled to Sweden in May 1940 where she was granted nationality in 1952. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966. The collection Revelation Freshly Erupting includes all the lyric poetry Sachs published in her lifetime, as well as posthumous poems.
The judges said of Revelation Freshly Erupting: »For many English-language readers, Andrew Shanks’s versions of the work of Nelly Sachs will bring a new poetic planet into view. Sachs emerges as a great poet of mourning and remembrance, and a commanding witness to the emotional afterlives of the exiled and dispossessed – a key experience of our world as much as hers.
Deeply thought, finely crafted, Shanks’s English transformations of her verse also give her ecstatic lyricism its proper due. This volume is an epic achievement: it wrests a visionary language, where tragedy and transcendence meet, from the darkest places of 20th-century experience.«
The winning title was selected from a shortlist of six, including works by Nobel Prize–winner Han Kang, Booker Prize–winner Jenny Erpenbeck, and Suhrkamp author Urszula Honek.
The prize received 147 submissions from 35 languages in 2024. The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation continues to make the list of submissions publicly available for use by translators, publishers, booksellers, cultural organisations and researchers, and in order to promote the cause of women in translation more generally. Previous winners include Judith Schalansky, Annie Ernaux, and Yoko Tawada.
The prize is generously supported in 2024 by the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures at the University of Warwick, Warwick Business School, and the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia.
Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) was a Jewish poet and playwright. Born in Berlin, she fled to Sweden in May 1940 where she was granted nationality in 1952. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966. The collection Revelation Freshly Erupting includes all the lyric poetry Sachs published in her lifetime, as well as posthumous poems.
The judges said of Revelation Freshly Erupting: »For many English-language readers, Andrew Shanks’s versions of the work of Nelly Sachs will bring a new poetic planet into view. Sachs emerges as a great poet of mourning and remembrance, and a commanding witness to the emotional afterlives of the exiled and dispossessed – a key experience of our world as much as hers.
Deeply thought, finely crafted, Shanks’s English transformations of her verse also give her ecstatic lyricism its proper due. This volume is an epic achievement: it wrests a visionary language, where tragedy and transcendence meet, from the darkest places of 20th-century experience.«
The winning title was selected from a shortlist of six, including works by Nobel Prize–winner Han Kang, Booker Prize–winner Jenny Erpenbeck, and Suhrkamp author Urszula Honek.
The prize received 147 submissions from 35 languages in 2024. The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation continues to make the list of submissions publicly available for use by translators, publishers, booksellers, cultural organisations and researchers, and in order to promote the cause of women in translation more generally. Previous winners include Judith Schalansky, Annie Ernaux, and Yoko Tawada.
The prize is generously supported in 2024 by the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures at the University of Warwick, Warwick Business School, and the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia.