The winners of this year’s Best Translated Book Award were announced last night at beautiful Idlewild Books in Manhattan. Chad Post, the director of Three Percent, which organizes the prize, and Open Letter Books gave a brief but spirited introductory speech. He struck a note of enthusiasm, saying that the award was conceived three years ago because, while it’s true that a relatively very small number of books are translated, it’s worth celebrating the ones that are in addition to bemoaning the ones that aren’t.
The fiction winner, in a contest that Post described as heated, was Gail Hareven’s The Confessions of Noa Weber
Acclaimed author Noa Weber has a successful “feminist” life: a strong career, a wonderful daughter she raised alone, and she is a recognized and respected cultural figure. Yet her interior life is bound by her obsessive love for one man—Alek, a Russian émigré and the father of her child, who has drifted in and out of her life.
Trying to understand—as well as free herself from—this lifelong obsession, Noa turns her pen on herself, and with relentless honesty dissects her life. Against the evocative setting of turbulent, modernday Israel, this examination becomes a quest to transform irrational desire into a greater, transcendent understanding of love.
Winner of the poetry prize was Elena Fanailova’s The Russian Version, translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler.
Congratulations to both. More winners tonight, as the National Book Critics Circle awards are announced at The New School in New York. The ceremony is open to the public.
