A new Jon Fosse prize has been launched in Norway to acknowledge the country’s literary translations for translating Norwegian to other languages.
The prize, named after the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Jon Fosse, will acknowledge and reward one author every year with 500,000 NOK for making “a particularly significant contribution to translating Norwegian literature into another language.”
The Jon Fosse prize is for translators translating from Bokmål and Nynorsk, the country’s two official standards for Norwegian.
Sira Myhre, the Director of the National Library of Norway, explains, “For a small language like Norwegian, the work of dedicated translators are crucial…It is a strenuous, creative and partly invisible work that brings literature to people and cultures closer together.”
For the inaugural Jon Fosse prize, Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel has been handed the achievement for Schmidt-Henkel’s longstanding translations from Norwegian into German.
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