The 2025 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize is now open for submissions.
Please complete our
Online Submission Form in order to submit a book. The deadline for submitting a completed application is
January 17, 2025.
Publishers in the USA and Canada are invited to submit five copies of a published translation from the German language into English for consideration. The translation must have been published (not only distributed) in the USA or Canada in 2024.
Shelley Frisch, jury chair of the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, reflects on the 25 year history of the prize in 2021, its significance to literature in translation, and its role in honoring the Wolff family’s extraordinary legacy in publishing.
Alexander Wolff, grandson of Kurt Wolff and author of
Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home, elucidates his grandfather's perennial undertaking to establish himself as a publisher on both sides of the Atlantic.
Kurt Wolff, joined later by his wife Helen, was one of the most outstanding and innovative publishers in Germany of the 1920s. Helen and Kurt Wolff immigrated to New York in 1941, and founded Pantheon Books, a publishing house devoted mainly to the translation of German and other European literature.
Dean Whiteside
Translation Grant Program Liaison
dean.whiteside@goethe.de
Goethe-Institut New York
30 Irving Place
New York, NY 10003
The Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize is supported by the Friends of Goethe New York, the Frankfurter Buchmesse, the German Consulate General New York, and Alexander Wolff.
