Finalists have been named for the biannual £2,000 (US$3,209) Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation, which celebrates the "high quality and diversity of translated fiction for young readers." The winner will be announced January 23, the Bookseller reported. The shortlisted translators are:
- Lucia Grave: The Midnight Train by Carlos Ruiz Zafron (translated from the Spanish)
- Fatima Sharafeddini: My Own Special Way by Mithaa Akhayyat, retold by Vivian French (Arabic)
- Howard Curtis: In the Sea There Are Crocodiles by Fabio Geda (Italian)
- Ros and Chloe Schwartz: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (French)
- Karin Chubb: Themba by Lutz van Dijk (German).
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Kurt Beals has won the first German Book Office Translation Prize, an unusual competition in which participants were asked to translate a 700-word extract of a German novel not yet published in English. Beals won a $600 commission to translate the first 15 pages of the novel, Gesellschaft mit beschraenkter Haftung by Nora Bossong. Elizabeth Janik was the runner up, and both translators will be added to the GBO and Goethe Institute translator databases.
Submissions for the prize were limited to translators who had no more than one translated book published in English and live in the U.S. Beals is a Ph.D. candidate in German literature and culture at the University of California at Berkeley.
The first round of judging was done by three American editors: Jenna Johnson from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, John Siciliano from Penguin and Lexy Bloom of Random House. The shortlist of nine was judged by three veteran translators: Susan Bernofsky, Burton Pike and Ross Benjamin.