The 2017 competition received a total of 58 eligible entries and 16 titles were longlisted.Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs. Memoirs of a Polar Bear was chosen from among six shortlisted titles that included translations from Polish, Russian and Irish. Translator Susan Bernofsky says of her winning translation: “This is an incredibly important book that quietly takes on some of the most vital themes of our time - inclusion and othering, racism, nationalism and xenophobia, the environment - while hiding its seriousness beneath a veneer of playfulness. Susan Bernofsky’s deft and delightful translation revels in the disorienting wit and unsettling perspectives of Tawada’s furry stars.” Magical fantasy collides with brutish political demagoguery. Human society has rarely been described with such acuity nor seemed so strangely wayward.
She blogs about translation at Further information about the translator is available at her webpage: The judges describe the winning title as “an unusual book, funny and sad at the same time, personal and yet very political. Her awards include the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize in 2014 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow. She directs the Literary Translation at Columbia programme in the MFA Writing Programme at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Further information about the author is available at her webpage: Translator Susan Bernofsky is one of the pre-eminent translators of German-language literature. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Goethe Medal. She writes both in her mother tongue of Japanese and in German, her adopted literary language.
She cleverly respects the actual behaviour of bears, even as her ursine authors inspect the vanities of humankind through marginal - or migrant - eyes.”Īuthor Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg in 1982 and has lived in Berlin since 2006. From this fantastic premise, Yoko Tawada builds a droll, playful but challenging fable about the role of the outsider, and the artist, in societies bound by convention and conformity of various kinds. Judge Boyd Tonkin writes of the winner: “In Memoirs of a Polar Bear, three generations of polar bears, stars of the circus and the zoo, learn to write and pen memoirs of their adventures, first in the Soviet bloc and then in re-united Germany.
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