"Nothing is good save the new… If anything of moment results—so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it."
- William Carlos Williams
"English literature lives on translation, it is fed by translations, every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translations, every allegedly great age is an age of translations, beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer."
- Ezra Pound
"Writing is difficult and 'strange,' insofar as its vision of reality
is unlike our vision of reality. Some writing is so remote from us
that it cannot be read at all—it repels us, or, on the contrary,
seduces us. We pretend that this writing is the manifestation of a
private vision, that it 'sees' a world, a reality, wholly different
from our own. Nothing could be further from the truth. We sequester
this writing, we call it exotic, or weird, or skewed, because
otherwise we would be faced with the intolerable proposition that the
reality such writing offers is, indeed, our own, but that we cannot,
though we live in the middle of it, recognize it."
- Gilbert Sorrentino
"We know that life is good for nothing."
- Viktor Shklovsky
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Omega Minor Wins Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2008
The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2008 has been awarded to the Belgian author Paul Verhaeghen for his novel Omega Minor, published by Dalkey Archive Press in November 2007. Paul Verhaeghen is the first author to have both written and translated the winning title and has therefore won the full £10,000 prize. The award, a partnership between Arts Council England and the Independent newspaper, was made in association with Champagne Taittinger in the UK. Past winners have included Immortality by Milan Kundera and Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.
The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the largest prize devoted to literary works in translation in the world, celebrates an exceptional work of fiction by a living author that has been translated into English from any other language. The judges for this year's prize are: literary editor of The
Independent, Boyd Tonkin; writer and teacher, Abdulrazak Gurnah; literary editor of Le Monde, Florence Noiville; and Arts Council
England Literature Officer, Kate Griffin.
Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century, Omega Minor (translated from the Dutch) is a tale of the survival of the soul. A novel of big ideas, the book's whirlwind plot is set between Berlin, Boston, Los Alamos and Auschwitz, and takes in neo-Nazis, a physics professor who returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoctorate who designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe and a Holocaust survivor, who tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist.
Omega Minor is Paul Verhaeghen's second novel and his first to be translated from Dutch into English. Aside from his writing career, Verhaeghen also works as a cognitive psychologist; his work focuses on memory and the basic aspects of cognitive ageing. He currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Paul Verhaeghen will be donating his prize money to the American Civil Liberties Union in protest of US foreign policy.
Antonia Byatt, Director, Literature Strategy at Arts Council England, said: "I am delighted Paul Verhaeghen has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It is a highly ambitious novel which tackles some of the major issues of our time. He deserves such recognition, not only for his remarkable writing but also for his huge achievement in translating his own work."
For more press and information about Paul Verhaeghen's Omega Minor, click here.
To read a transcript of Paul Verhaeghen's "non-acceptance speech" (in which he accepted the award but donated the prize money), click here.
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