The Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translation from German has this year been awarded to Sally-Ann Spencer for The Swarm by Franz Schätzing (881pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £7.99. 978 0 340 89523 5). A thriller based on an ecological disaster, this novel, first published in 2004, dominated the best-seller lists in Germany for over two years and has been widely translated. At over 800 pages, it represents a formidable task for a translator – one entailing precise scientific terminology and detailed descriptions of laboratory work, as an international team of scientists try to establish what exactly is happening in the ocean depths to cause the chaos in the world around them.

Sarah Adams, winner of this year’s Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation from French, faced a very different task. Just Like Tomorrow by Faïza Guène, published in France in 2004 (184pp. Chatto and Windus. £5.99. 978 0 701 17910 6), is a short, humorous first novel by a young woman of Algerian descent who lives in the suburbs of Paris. Her heroine is fourteen, going on fifteen, sharply and wittily observant of her fellow immigrant neighbours and pesky social workers in the tower block estate where she lives with her mother. Teenage slang is deftly dealt with, as we learn of her anxieties about identity, despair about school, and dreams of the future.

The Vondel Prize for translation from the Dutch or Flemish has gone to Susan Massotty for My Father’s Notebook by Kader Abdolah (323pp. Canongate. £7.99. 978 1 84195 927 6). Of Iranian origin, Abdolah arrived in the Netherlands as a political refugee in the late 1990s, and now writes in Dutch. In the TLS of May 5, 2006, Nora Mahony writes, “A storyteller of the utmost subtlety and natural ease, Abdolah evokes with great affection and sadness the land and the people of his home country, interleaving sufficient history to give a sense of the fear and bewilderment felt by rural Iran at the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the growth of Islamist extremism, violence and revolt”. She comments on Massotty’s “smooth” translation and the author’s “light touch”, as he deals with the traumas of the past and his narrator’s adjustment to a new life in Holland.

The Premio Valle Inclán for translation from Spanish has gone to Nick Caistor for The Sleeping Voice by Dulce Chacón (304pp. Harvill Secker. £11.99. 978 1 8434 3209 8). First published in 2002 to critical and popular acclaim, the novel gives voice to the women who fought on, or sympathized with, the losing side in the Spanish Civil War, as they await sentence in jail in 1939. Based on the author’s own interviews with survivors, narratives are woven out of individual reminiscences, each with its own distinctive voice – another challenge for the translator. Unfortunately, the English version is at present out of print.

The Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for translation from Arabic has been awarded to Farouk Abdel Wahab for The Lodging House by the Egyptian novelist Khairy Shalaby (434pp. The American University in Cairo Press. £24.50. 978 977 424944 0). The novel was first published in 1999, and was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz medal for literature in 2003. The narrator is a down-and-out young student, thrown out of his institute for assaulting a teacher, who finds himself living rough with a motley crew of characters on the fringe of society. Maya Jaggi, one of the judges, speaks of the “zest” of the translation of a “wise, anarchic, ribald, compassionate compendium of life at its most precarious and most ebullient”.

The Risa Domb/Porjes Prize for translation from Hebrew has been given to Nicholas de Lange for A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz (517pp. Vintage. £7.99. 978 0 099 45003 0). Oz’s memoir evokes his childhood, his parents and his forebears, as he grows up in Jerusalem in the 1940s. The Europe his parents have left behind becomes a “forbidden promised land”, a “genuine, cosy world, far from the dusty tin roofs, the urban wasteland of scrap iron and thistles, the parched hillsides of our Jerusalem, suffocating under the weight of white-hot summer”. In his review in the TLS of September 17, 2004, Gabriel Josipovici comments: “It is a universal human story, but it is also a very Jewish story, and in telling it Oz has written his best book so far”. He also remarks on de Lange’s “splendidly resourceful translation”.

The Rossica Prize for translation from the Russian has been won by Joanne Turnbull for Seven Stories by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (208pp. Moscow: Glas; distributed by Inpress. £8.88. 978 5 7172 0073 8). These are the first stories by Krzhizhanovsky to appear in English, a writer from the 1920s who has only recently been rediscovered in Russia. Oliver Ready in his TLS review of October 13, 2006, comments: “It is the play of language rather than plot that drives Krzhizhanovsky’s writing. Neologisms, wordplay and rapid shifts in register achieve a dynamic, polyphonic effect, which is admirably captured here in Joanne Turnbull’s excellent translation”.

At an event organized by the British Centre for Literary Translation, the prizes were presented by the Editor of the TLS, Sir Peter Stothard, in London, on Thursday, November 8. This was followed by the 2007 Sebald Lecture, given by Marina Warner with the title “Stranger Magic: True stories and translated selves”.

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