David Bellos, Princeton professor of French and comparative
literature, has won the Man Booker International Prize for Translation.
He is being honored for his translations of works by Albanian poet and
novelist Ismail Kadaré, selected earlier this month to receive the
first Man Booker International Prize. The £60,000 prize seeks to
recognize a living author who has contributed significantly to world
literature.
In keeping with the international focus of the prize, the Man Group and
the Booker Prize Foundation established an additional prize of £15,000
(about $27,000) to be awarded if the winning author is published in
English translation.
Kadaré has chosen Bellos to receive the translation prize, and both
will be honored during a ceremony June 27 in Edinburgh, Scotland.
"During the first stages of judging for the Man Booker International
Prize we, the judges, became increasingly aware of the huge role
translators play in making first-rate fiction accessible to a global
audience," said John Carey, chair of the judges for the prize.
Kadaré first won fame as a poet, although he is much better known
internationally for his prose novels. His first novel, "The General of
the Dead Army," was published in 1963. His works are published in
France by Éditions Fayard, and they comprise novels, stories, story
collections, a collection of verse and a play. The first 11 volumes of
his "Complete Works" are now in print in Albanian and French.
Bellos, who coordinated a visit by Kadaré to Princeton's campus last
December, is one of several English translators of the author's work.
He has translated four of his novels: "The File on H" (1997); "The
Pyramid" (1996); "Spring Flowers, Spring Frost" (2002); and "The
Successor" (forthcoming this fall). The fifth, "Agamemnon's Daughter,"
will be completed later this year.
Bellos joined the Princeton faculty in 1997 after teaching at the
universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Southampton and Manchester. He has
published several books on French writer Honoré de Balzac as well as
many articles on the history of fiction and the book market in
19th-century France.
He also has published works on modern French writer Georges Perec,
first as his principal English translator and then as the author of the
first literary biography on him, "Georges Perec: A Life in Words,"
which was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie in 1994. He is the
author of a biographical study of the French filmmaker Jacques Tati,
and he currently is working on a biography of the French novelist and
diplomat Romain Gary. Bellos holds the rank of Chevalier dans l'Ordre
des Palmes Académiques bestowed by the French government.
