Maya Vinokour of the University of Pennsylvania has won the Rossica Young Translators Prize 2011 for her translation of the extract from Anna Starobinets' novel 'Zhivushy'. The result was announced at a special event at the London Book Fair in the Pen Literary Cafes by Rossica Young Translator judge and esteemed translator Andrew Bromfield. All three judges were particularly impressed by the professionalism of Maya's translation.

I'm a first-year PhD student in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in Russian and German literature.  I was born in Moscow and have been in the States since the age of four.  I graduated from the University of Chicago in 2008 and taught in Boston before moving to Philadelphia in 2010.   I've always been an avid reader of Russian books, and have particularly enjoyed translation -- an activity at once rigorous (because you have to remain faithful to the original) and enormously creative (because there are a million ways to do so).  

My choice of excerpt was motivated by my abiding interest in the theme of spectatorship, which I thought was quite pronounced in Anna Starobinets' novel.  My B.A. thesis was about the ways in which spectatorship destroys the individual identities of the protagonists in Franz Kafka's novels.  Zhivushchij imagines a dystopian future whose central feature -- the fully integrated yet strangely atomized population of the Living -- seemed to me stationed at the mathematical limit of the enormous, malevolent bureaucracies frequently found in Kafka's works.  

This year there were 54 entries for the prize from all over the world! - 22 for Vodolazkin , 20 for Starobinets and 12 for Danilkin. The judges also selected shortlisted 4 other entries for the prize.

The shortlisted entrants are:

Eugenia Sokolskaya – Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania  – Gagarin

Lucy Morris – no affiliation – Solovyov and Larionov

Claire Hegarty – Christ Church College, Oxford – Solovyov and Larionov

Irina Sadovina – SSEES - Gagarin

Thank you to everybody who entered the Russian Young Translators Prize 2011.