Last night two independent presses won the 2010 Best Translated Book Awards, rising to the top of a shortlist drawn from an impressive collection of publishers.
Gail Hareven won the fiction award for The Confessions of Noa Weber, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu and published by Melville House Press. Elena Fanailova won the poetry award for The Russian Version, translated from the Russian by Genya
Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler and published by Ugly Duckling Presse. The complete press release is embedded after the jump.
Here’s more from Melville House Press publisher Dennis Johnson: “[This fiction award] represents what we see as part of our mission at Melville House: Not just to publish both fiction and nonfiction in translation for the sake of essentially preserving it, as if it were something on the verge of going extinct. That strikes us as a way of further ensuring its obscurity. Rather, we see it as our mission to trumpet that work loudly, and to work aggressively to get that work in the hands of as many people as possible, especially those who would not normally encounter translated literature.”