This year's Best Translated Book Award winners are Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (And Other Stories) for fiction; and Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas, translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan (Phoneme Media) for poetry. Each winner receives $10,000, with half going to the author, half to the translator. There will also be a celebration May 11, during BookExpo America, at 57th St. Books in Chicago.
BTBA judge Jason Grunebaum said Dillman has "crafted a dazzling voice in English for Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World, a transformative tale of a young woman's trip on foot from Mexico to the U.S. to deliver a package and find a brother. This novel of real pathos and unexpected displacement in self, place, and language achieves a near perfect artistic convergence of translator and author, while giving readers an urgent account from today's wall-building world."
Praising Hilary Kaplan's work on Rilke Shake, BTBA judge Tess Lewis said she has "done the grant and Freitas's poems justice, capturing the many shifts in tone in and between the lines, from playful to wry to sardonic to pathetic, even sentimental, to deadpan and back to playful, sometimes within a single poem. For all of Freitas's lyric clowning, it's clear she takes poetry too seriously not to dismantle it and use it to her own purposes."