The Warwick Prize for Nelly Sachs

Andrew Shanks has won the 2024 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation with Revelation Freshly Erupting by Nelly Sachs.

The £1,000 prize was established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and to increase the number of international women’s voices accessible to British and Irish readers. The prize was judged by Amanda Hopkinson, Boyd Tonkin and Susan Bassnett.

In accepting the prize, Andrew Shanks (his brief talk, laid out in the form he uses to phrase out sermons, should not be confused with an attempt at verse!) said:

Nelly Sachs was a German Jew.
As late as the middle of May 1940,
   she, and her mother, were still in Berlin,
      anxiously awaiting the Swedish entry visa that they needed.
The day they escaped, by plane, to Stockholm,
   Nazi tanks were racing through France,
   breaking through the border defences of Belgium,
   circulating freely through the Netherlands.
She was forty-eight.
She’d previously just dabbled in literature.
It was the trauma of exile which made her a great poet.

I’ve been translating Sachs’s work
   for over forty years now, on and off.
I first came across it one idle afternoon,
   whilst browsing in a bookshop
    in Marburg an der Lahn,
     where I was living at the time.
I’d never heard of her.
In my experience, not many
   English-speaking people have.
And yet, in 1966 she was awarded
   the ...