ACFNY TRANSLATION PRIZE | PANEL TALK & AWARD CEREMONY
“Memory and Identity in Contemporary Austrian Literature”
The 2017 Austrian Cultural Forum Translation Prize will be awarded to the writer and translator Adrian West for his outstanding translation of an excerpt of Josef Winkler‘s Die Verschleppung/The Abduction in which Winkler retells the true story of Njetotschka Iljashenko, a young Ukrainian woman who survived Stalin’s Holodomor only to be taken by the Nazis as a forced laborer to rural Carinthia, Austria.
Prior to the ceremony, Adrian West will be joined in conversation by Josef Winkler himself as well as the US-Austrian writer John Wray. The talk “Memory and Identity in Contemporary Austrian Literature” will be moderated by Isabelle Burden. The laudation for Adrian West will be delivered by Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s Jeremy Davies.
ABOUT THE ACFNY TRANSLATION PRIZE WINNER 2017
Adrian Nathan West is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation (Repeater, 2016) and translates from German, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian. He is the translator of Josef Winkler’s When the Time Comes (Contra Mundum, 2013), Natura Morta (Contra Mundum, 2014), and The Graveyard of Bitter Oranges (Contra Mundum, 2015). For his outstanding translation of a sample text from Josef Winkler’s Die Verschleppung/The Abduction, West is the recipient of the 2017 Austrian Cultural Forum New York Translation Prize. He lives in Pamplona, Spain.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Josef Winkler is one of Austria’s most notable contemporary authors. The self-taught writer’s first novel Menschenkind was published by Suhrkamp in 1979, paving the way for an exceptional literary career. Today, Winkler’s books have been translated into 16 different languages. He received numerous awards, including the most prestigious awards in German-language literature such as the “Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis”, the “Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis für Literatur” and the “Georg-Büchner-Preis.” He lives in Klagenfurt.
ABOUT JOHN WRAY
John Wray is the author of several novels including The Right Hand of Sleep, (Knopf, 2001), Canaan’s Tongue (2005), Lowboy (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2008), and the Lost Time Accidents (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2016). He was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow and is a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. In July 2017, he won the Deutschlandfunkpreis at the Ingeborg-Bachmann Days in Klagenfurt. He lives in Brooklyn.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
Isabelle Burden has a Bachelors’s degree in Literature and German Studies from Johns Hopkins University and is currently working towards her MFA in fiction writing at Columbia. Raised in New York, she has lived in Germany and completed projects as a freelance translator for clients including the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin, Rimini Protokoll’s Top Secret International show, and most recently, publishing house Simon & Schuster.
ABOUT JEREMY M. DAVIES
Jeremy M. Davies is the author of two novels, Rose Alley and Fancy, and a book of short stories, The Knack of Doing. He is an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
In partnership with and supported by Trafika Europe.
With the kind support of Suhrkamp Verlag.