Friday, 2 October, 9am-5pm
Conference Centre
British Library
96 Euston Road
London NW1 2DB
Tickets: £35
Book online
Polish Book Institute, Polish Cultural Institute London, and Polish Cultural Institute New York are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2015 Found in Translation Award is Ursula Phillips for her translation of Choucas by Zofia Nałkowska, published in 2014 by Northern Illinois University Press.
An award in the amount of 10,000 PLN will be presented on the 2nd of October during International Translation Day at the British Library in London.
The Found in Translation Award is presented annually to the translator or translators of the best translation of Polish literature into English in the form of a book in the previous calendar year.
Ursula Phillips is a British writer on Polish literature and translator of fiction and academic books, who lives in London. She aims to make Polish female authors more visible not only through research but also through literary translations, with special focus on writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In 2012 she published a translation of Narcyza Żmichowska’s novel The Heathen (1846) and also republished her own earlier translation of Maria Wirtemberska’s Malvina, or The Heart’s Intuition (1816). In addition to Choucas, she has translated another of Zofia Nałkowska’s novels Boundary (1935), which is forthcoming. Her current goal is to translate and popularize more Polish female authors of the early to mid-twentieth century. As a committed European, she sees translation as a means of integrating neglected Polish texts into wider literary and cultural discussions as well as broadening what is studied in courses on Polish literature.
She has also translated fiction by contemporary authors, including Wiesław Myśliwski’s The Palace, which was her first literary translation, and several works by Agnieszka Taborska. Translations of academic works have been in the fields of history and literary criticism, including Grażyna Borkowska’s ground-breaking study Alienated Women: A Study on Polish Women’s Fiction 1845-1918. Meanwhile she has contributed to and edited several volumes of essays on Polish literature, the most recent being Polish Literature in Transformation, edited with the assistance of Knut Andreas Grimstad and Kris Van Heuckelom (2013) based on a conference she organized at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in 2011 with support from the Polish Cultural Institute in London and the Polish Book Institute.
Ursula has degrees in Russian and Polish, and gained a PhD at the Institute for Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. She is currently Honorary Research Associate of UCL SSEES, where she previously worked for many years in the School’s library as an area specialist and occasionally as a teacher of Polish literature.
PREVIOUSLY AWARDED
2014 - Philip Boehm for Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall (Peirene Press, 2013)
2013 - Antonia Lloyd-Jones for the entirety of her output in 2012: Paweł Huelle Cold Sea Stories (Comma Press), Jacek Dehnel Saturn (Dedalus Press), Zygmunt Miłoszewski A Grain of Truth (Bitter Lemon Press), Artur Domosławski Ryszard Kapuściński, A Life (Verso Books), Wojciech Jagielski The Night Wanderers (Seven Stories & Old Street Publishing), Andrzej Szczeklik Kore: On Sickness, the Sick and the Search for the Soul of Medicine (Counterpoint Press), Janusz Korczak Kaytek the Wizard (Urim Publications/Penlight Press)
2012 - Joanna Trzeciak for Sobbing Superpower by Tadeusz Różewicz (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011)
2011 - Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak for Here by Wisława Szymborska (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)
2010 - Danuta Borchardt for Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz (Grove Press, 2009)
2009 - Antonia Lloyd-Jones for The Last Supper by Paweł Huelle (Serpent's Tail, 2008)
2008 - Bill Johnston for New Poems by Tadeusz Różewicz (Archipelago Books, 2007)