Jury rewards Tomer Gardi’s “daredevil” novel: “A round thing”
The nomination was already considered spectacular, as Gardi’s novel is half translated from Hebrew and half composed in a German language that deliberately breaks the rules of spelling and grammar, but charges words with a new, strangely skewed meaning. The jury, which actually decides on new German-language publications in the fiction category, thus rewarded the author’s daring and willingness to experiment orally” learned about hearing and speaking. Today Tomer Gardi lives in Berlin. His novel was published by the Austrian Droschl Literaturverlag based in Graz.
Non-Fiction Prize for Uljana Wolf for “Etymological Gossip”
The poet and translator Uljana Wolf was honored in the non-fiction/essay category for the volume “Etymologischer Gossip”. According to the jury, in the essays and speeches it contains, she deals with the socio-political role of language and translation with great esprit. The form in which the author, who was born in East Berlin in 1979, writes “is not unaffected” by this, as a “guessay, translabor, test arrangement” that invites you to “continue talking, fabulating and ‘gossiping'”. The volume of essays was published by the Berlin independent publisher kookbooks.
Her book could have been nominated in all three categories, praised juror Andreas Platthaus, as a non-fiction book about the work of translating poetry, which is also an “intellectual biography” of the author and her life issues.
Author Anne Weber honored as translator of “Nevermore”.
Anne Weber was honored with the Leipzig Book Fair 2022 prize in the Translation category. The author and translator received the award for her translation of Cécile Wajsbrot’s novel “Nevermore” (Wallstein) from French. In Wajsbrot’s novel, translation as a struggle for the right words becomes a topic in itself, since the book’s protagonist is a translator who moves from Paris to Dresden after the death of a friend. In her luggage she has Virginia Woolf’s novel “To the Lighthouse”, which she is supposed to translate into French. Weber’s “metatranslation” “triangulate” between three languages. The jury judged that her “linguistic art” was particularly challenged.
Weber, born in Offenbach in 1964, lives in Paris. Her novel “Kirio” was shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2017. For “Annette, a heroine epic”, she was awarded the German Book Prize in 2020. In it she describes the life of a French resistance fighter in the form of a poem.