‘Revelation Freshly Erupting’ by Nobel Prize winner Nelly Sachs, translated by Andrew Shanks has won the £1,000 literary prize.
Nelly Sachs (1891-1970) was a 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 and an introductory essay.
Her early poetry is described by the publisher Carcanet Press as a monumental lament for the victims of the Holocaust. Later poems develop themes including biblical, Kabbalist and religious allusions, the refugee experience, personal bereavement, mental crisis and recovery.
The judges said, “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 winner was selected from a shortlist spanning cultures, languages, genres and forms. The shortlist of six titles included translations from French (France), German (Germany), Korean (South Korea), Polish (Poland), and Portuguese (Brazil).
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.
Judge Susan Bassnett commented on the titles submitted to the prize in 2024, “The variety of works submitted for this prize continues to be impressive. From more languages than ever before and genres which included literary journalism, children’s literature, young adult fiction, more poetry than in previous years, detective fiction and some books that defy easy genre classification.
“As ever, reading so many books by women from around the world, brilliantly translated by gifted translators is a real pleasure.”
The judges have also awarded a special commendation in 2024 to ‘Kairos’, written by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hofmann and published by Granta. The judges commented:
“In Jenny Erpenbeck’s supremely skilful hands, the story of the heart becomes the story of the state. Out of a single, secretive love affair in East Germany during its final years, Kairos fashions a brilliantly observed chronicle of passion, compromise, defiance and betrayal as both a relationship, and a whole way of living and feeling, crumbles.
“Michael Hofmann’s taut, vivid and agile translation does eloquent justice to the inner and outer worlds of characters locked into private, and public, histories of doomed desires and broken dreams.”
The prize is judged by Amanda Hopkinson, Boyd Tonkin and Susan Bassnett.
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.
