We are thrilled to share that The Union of Synchronised Swimmers by Cristina Sandu and Raphaela Edelbauer's The Liquid Land (trans. Jen Calleja) have been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for fiction in translation.
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.
The winning prize of £2,000 will be awarded at Oxford Translation Day on 11 June 2022, at St Anne’s College. For more information on the prize, please visit the website here.
Congratulations to Cristina, Raphaela and Jen, and all the other shortlisted authors and translators!
It’s summer behind the Iron Curtain, and six girls are about to swim their way to the Olympics — and a new life.
In an unnamed Soviet state, six girls meet each day to swim. At first, they play, splashing each other and floating languidly on the water’s surface. But soon the game becomes something more.
They hone their bodies relentlessly. Their skin shades into bruises. They barter cigarettes stolen from the factory where they work for swimsuits to stretch over their sunburnt skin. They tear their legs into splits, flick them back and forth, like herons. They force themselves to stop breathing.
When…
When her parents die in a car accident, highly talented Austrian physicist Ruth Schwarz is confronted with a problem. Her parents’ will calls for them to be buried in their childhood home — but for strangers, the village of Gross-Einland remains stubbornly hidden from view.
When Ruth finally finds her way there, she makes a disturbing discovery: beneath the town lies a vast cavern that exerts a strange control over the lives of the villagers. There are hidden clues about the hole everywhere, but nobody wants to talk about it — not even when it becomes clear that the stability of the entire town is…
Jen Calleja
Jen Calleja is a British writer and literary translator. She’s the…
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Raphaela Edelbauer
Raphaela Edelbauer was born in Vienna in 1990. She studied Language Art…
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Cristina Sandu
Cristina Sandu was born in 1989 in Helsinki to a Finnish-Romanian…
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