Germany’s Goethe-Institut has just announced the winner of this year’s Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the German government-funded prize celebrating an outstanding literary translation from German into English published in the U.S. in the previous year. This year’s winner of the $10,000 prize is Jackie Smith, for her translation of Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses (New Directions), picked from a shortlist of four translated works.

Said the judges’ citation, “Jackie Smith’s translation . . . brilliantly captures the musicality of the original text, its philosophical depths, psychological insights, meticulous scientific observations—as well as its playful ingenuity and deeply poetic imagination.”

Walker Caplan

Walker Caplan

Walker Caplan is a Staff Writer at Lit Hub and a writer/performer from Seattle.