Entry Requirements

Entry Requirements for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2023

The Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. It was founded by Lord Weidenfeld and is supported by New College, The Queen’s College, and St Anne’s College, Oxford.

Previous winners include: Nancy Naomi Carlson for Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars (Seagull Books); Nichola Smalley for Andrzej Tichý’s Wretchedness (And Other Stories); David Hackston for Pajtim Statovci’s Crossing (Pushkin); Celia Hawkesworth for Ivo Andrić’s Omer Pasha Latas (New York Review Books); Lisa Dillman for Andrés Barba’s Such Small Hands (Portobello); Frank Perry for Lina Wolff’s Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs (And Other Stories); Philip Roughton for Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s The Heart of Man (MacLehose); Paul Vincent and John Irons for 100 Dutch-Language Poems (Holland Park); Susan Bernofsky for Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days (Portobello); Susan Wicks for Valérie Rouzeau’s Talking Vrouz (Arc); Philip Boehm for Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel (Portobello); Judith Landry for Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus).

This year’s judges are Vittoria Fallanca, Joseph Hankinson, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, and Holly Langstaff (Chair).

The longlist will be announced in early May 2023. The shortlist will be announced in late May 2023. The prize of £2000 will be awarded at the annual Oxford Translation Day at St Anne’s College, Oxford in June 2023. Oxford Translation Day will feature talks, seminars, and workshops, and will give shortlisted translators the opportunity to read from and discuss their work.

How to Enter

The judges will consider the quality of the translation as well as the importance of the original work and the value of its being put into English. We encourage entries from under-represented languages in the English-speaking book market, as well as from more established languages.

The opening date for entries is 1 December 2022. The closing date for entries is 31 January 2023.

To be eligible, a translation must be a work of fiction, poetry or drama written in any living European language by any author living or dead. It must be a book published for the first time in print form in the United Kingdom in the year 2022. Although the book’s first UK publication must fall in the year 2022, it is still eligible if it was previously published in English elsewhere. Only books published in the UK are eligible. To prove the book complies with this rule it needs to have a UK ISBN, have the price printed in Pounds Sterling and be distributed in the UK.

It may be the work of up to three translators.

To enter, one physical copy and one digital copy (as either EPUB or PDF) of each entry must be submitted. It will not be possible to return physical copies.

Entries should be accompanied by a statement of the date of publication and a contact address and telephone number.

Physical copies should be sent to:

Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT)

St Anne’s College,
56 Woodstock Road,
Oxford,
United Kingdom
OX2 6HS

Digital copies should be sent to Georgia Nasseh at comparative.criticism@st-annes.ox.ac.uk. These files will be kept strictly confidential and will only be circulated to the judges.