2009 Awards

you are here: Literature > Rossica Prize > 2009 Awards

Amanda Love Darragh wins the Rossica Prize 2009!
< >   play


 

ROSSICA TRANSLATION PRIZE 

 

 

AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN RUSSIAN TO ENGLISH LITERARY TRANSLATION

 

Winner announced!

 

At 8pm on Monday 25th of May 2009, day of Saints Kyril and Methodius, during the award ceremony at the London Review Bookshop, Amanda Love Darragh was announced winner of the Rossica Prize 2009. Shortly afterwards, James Rann, postgraduate student at SSEES, received first prize in the inaugural Rossica Young Translators Prize. Well attended by publishers, translators, writers, members of the press and many influential figures in the academic world, the evening was an enjoyable and memorable affair. Download the Rossica Prize Brochure.

 

The judges expressed their gratitude to publishers, translators and organisers alike for the impressive number of entries, and the range of literary works submitted. They stressed how difficult it had been to decide on a winner given the sheer quantity and diversity of different titles.

 

Special commendation went to Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes for their translation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, published by One World Classics in 2008. Robert Maguire was also specially commended for his translation of Dostoevsky's Demons, published in 2008 by Penguin.

 

The prize, of £5,000, awarded for the best translation published in 2007 or 2008, was shared between the translator and the publisher. We would like to congratulate both Amanda Love Darragh and Natasha Perova, editor at Glas.

 

The newly instituted Rossica Young Translators Prize, worth £300, is for the best English translation of a passage of contemporary Russian literature. Having got off to a sterling start, the Rossica Young Translators Prize will continue to cultivate the new generation of talented and dynamic translators.

 

“This exercise has been challenging, exciting, and bodes well for the future of Russian literature and Russian studies in English speaking countries.” – Professor Robert Porter.

 

The shortlist is in alphabetical order of translators' surnames. 

 

The Shortlist

 

 

WINNER! - Iramifications

by Maria Galina
Translated by Amanda Love Darragh
Glas; 2008; pp. 368
The central theme of "Iramifications" is the eternal misunderstanding between East and West. Misconceptions and the notion of identity are explored on a journey from Odessa to the symbolic Oriental city of Iram, via the complexity of friendship and the blurring of borders between fantasy and reality. Tales are woven, deserts are crossed, and battles are fought. East and West are worlds apart...or are they?
more...

One Soldier's War in Chechnya

by Andrei Babchenko
Translated by Nick Allen
Portobello Books, November 2007, pp.404
Written shortly after his discharge from the army, the book burns with the need to tell of his personal ordeal and that of his fellows as young, innocent and woefully inexperienced grunts condemned to a miserable life ruled by shell-shocked superiors and perpetual threats.
more...

Romance With Cocaine

by Mikhail Ageyev
Translated by Hugh Aplin
Hesperus, 2008, pp.180
A bizarre and deeply disturbing account of a young man's descent into addiction, this story brilliantly mirrors the tumultuous events of early 20th-century Russian history. Struggling with the confusion and insecurities that adolescence brings, Vadim seeks an outlet for his frustration.
more...

Humiliated and Insulted

by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated by Ignat Avsey
One World Classics, 2008, pp. 391
Oscar Wilde claimed that Humiliated and Insulted is not "at all inferior to the other great masterpieces" and Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel, and the reader is plunged into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma and, above all, unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships.
more...

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin
Translated by Andrew Bromfield
Faber and Faber, 2008, pp.333
Described as "the Zen Buddhist Will Self of the former Evil Empire", Victor Pelevin is a star of contemporary Russian literature. The Sacred Book Of The Werewolf is an extraordinarily accomplished piece of contemporary writing that mashes up an assortment of genres: horror, humour, romance, fantasy, satire and post-modern self-reflexivity and sampling. The result is something that has to be classified as "high" literature, if only because of its entanglings in and borrowings from the work of Vladimir Nabokov and its deadly serious critique of contemporary Russian society under Putin.
more...

Birdsong on the Seabed

by Elena Shvarts
Translated by Sasha Dugdale
Bloodaxe Books; 2008; pp. 167
This new bilingual Russian-English selection also includes some poems not yet been published in Russia. Elena Shvarts stands outside all schools and movements in contemporary Russian poetry. She once famously described poetry as a 'dance without legs'. Her own poetry fits this description perfectly, a combination of deeply rhythmic and lyrical dance with the eccentric, perpetual movement of flight.
more...

Ice

by Vladimir Sorokin
Translated by Jamey Gambrell
New York Review of Books; 2007; pp.321
In stripped down, poker-faced prose, Sorokin registers a world in which the inhumanity of man to man is exploited by a murderous emerging race who are, by contrast, in sweet mutual harmony with one another. This is a Master and Margarita for the age of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
more...

All Entries...


more...
go
enru