Competition Winners’ Fanfare! 

We’re thrilled to announce the winners of And Other Stories’ most recent translation sample competition, which ran last month in partnership with the 2014 cityuniversitylondon translation summer school, ‘Translate in the City’. 

Our aim is to give translators starting out a chance to get involved in a very ordinary, crucial but often ignored part of the process by which publishers discover and select new translators: competitive sample translation. 

We provided excerpt texts from books we’re considering in four languages: French, German, Spanish and Italian. Translators were able to submit sample translations of as many of these as they liked. We had strong entries in all four languages, with a particularly impressive showing in French. 

Italian: Elizabeth Thomson, Sole Bruciato (‘Burnt Sun’) by Elvira Dones

German: Mandy Wight, Ihre Musik (‘Their Music’) by Thomas Stangl

Spanish: Chloe Catan, El Discurso Vacío (‘Empty Speech’) by Mario Levrero

French: Jennifer Higgins, Nouons-Nous (‘Let’s Get Together’ – or ‘One Two One’ perhaps) by Emmanuelle Pagano

All four translators will be invited to join upcoming reading groups in their languages, as and when these are convened. While we can’t promise anything, some winners from previous sample competitions have found themselves working on translations for us, including Zoë Perry, on All Dogs are Blue,and Julia Sanches on Now and at the Hour of our Death, which we’re publishing next year. We’re always on the lookout for brilliant new translators to bring exciting books to our attention.