Penguin Random House | London, 10/09/2019

No International Bestsellers Without Top Translators

Usually, translators stay in the background. But the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize was created just for them: It honors outstanding achievements by young translators. In 2019, it was presented for excellent translations from French into English. Anna Leader’s translation of an excerpt from “Real Men” by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was picked as the winner.

Naturally, all the attention on a bestseller is initially focused on the author as its  creator. But for a book to become a worldwide success, it needs more, namely excellent translators. And it is precisely this skill that Harvill Secker, the Penguin Random House publisher, has honored for ten years now with its Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize. Once a year, Harvill Secker awards its eponymous prize to young translators who have already demonstrated exceptional translation performance early in their careers. This year, Anna Leader received the £1,000 award, a translator mentoring program and a selection of Vintage books. The judges bestowed the prize on her translation of an excerpt from “Real Men” (De purs hommes) by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, from French into English. The author comes from Senegal.

French originals were the focus of the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize 2019. The language changes from year to year. Translators between the ages of 18 and 34 with no more than one full-length translation published are eligible to apply. There is no restriction on country of residence. Anna Leader was born to American-British parents, but grew up in Luxembourg with its typical linguistic diversity. And another thing that seems typical for many Luxembourgers is their interest in translation. Anna Leader, for example, already  won first prizes for translating poems by Jules Laforgue and Jan Wagner into English during her school days. Later she even translated for the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture. In 2018, she graduated from Princeton with a degree in Comparative Literature.

On receiving her award, Anna said: “It was a pleasure and a thrill to receive a call from London, as I walked to work in New Jersey one morning, announcing that I had won the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize. I am grateful to Penguin Random House, the National Centre for Writing, and my future mentor Sarah Ardizzone for this incredible opportunity. This excerpt from Sarr’s De purs hommes serves as a reminder that French is a language spoken and written outside of France, just as English is spoken outside of England: facts that I know well, having grown up in Luxembourg to British-American parents.” She added that she is excited about the mentorship program, which she says will broaden her understanding of what translation can do.

The judges gave the following statement:  ‘We were hugely impressed with Anna Leader’s winning translation. The musicality, rhythm and flow of her prose brilliantly captures the power in this challenging excerpt from Sarr’s novel, and confidently pulls the reader through its complex and surprising turns.” They admitted that they had received many promising entries and found it incredibly hard to choose just one from a range of creative and fluent translations, and were therefore thrilled to additionally give a second-place award to Hayley Wood and two well-deserved honorable mentions to Samuel Weinberger and James Bennett this year.