Professor Susan Bernofsky Awarded 2019 Friedrich Ulfers Prize

Translator and professor Susan Bernofsky was announced as the 2019 winner of the Ulfers Prize. The Friedrich Ulfers Prize was established in 2013 and is awarded annually by Deutsches Haus at New York University to a leading publisher, writer, critic, translator, or scholar who has championed the advancement of German-language literature in the United States. The prize, which is endowed with a $5000 grant, has previously been awarded to Burton Pike, Robert Weil, Sara Bershtel, and Carol Brown Janeway. The Friedrich Ulfers Prize is Festival Neue Literatur’s testimony to the rising importance of German-language literature in America. Fellow author and Columbia professor Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances, FSG, 2008) will present the award at the March 28th event. Galchen refers to Bernofsky’s translations as “an extraordinary work of art.”

In a prepared statement, Bernofsky is quoted, saying, “The rich body of literature written in the German-speaking countries has been dear to my heart right from the beginning, ever since Franz Kafka and the brothers Grimm first rocked my adolescent world. Getting to translate some of these gorgeous stories I love and write them in English has been just the biggest thrill.”

Bernofsky directs the iterary Translation program at Columbia in the Columbia. Her translations include works by Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Yoko Tawada. Her translation of Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days, won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016) won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. She is currently writing a biography of Walser and blogs about translation at www.translationista.com.