ASF Awards 2011 Translation Prize to Michael Meigs
The Board of Trustees of The American-Scandinavian Foundation announced that Michael Meigs from Austin, Texas, has been awarded the 31st annual ASF Translation Prize for his translation of The Dean (Dekanen) a novel by Swedish author Lars Gustafsson (b. 1936.)
The judges praised his translation and made the following comments about his work. “With great confidence and flair this elegant translation conveys the ironic tone of the narrator in Lars Gustafsson’s The Dean, capturing perfectly the pretensions and insecurities of the main characters as well as the social context of contemporary academic life.”
As the winner, Mr. Meigs receives a $2,000 honorarium and a commemorative bronze medallion.
An excerpt of the translation will appear in an upcoming issue of Scandinavian Review, the journal published by The American-Scandinavian Foundation.
The ASF Translation Prize, along with the Leif and Inger Sjöberg Award, are the only prizes regularly awarded in the U.S. for English translation of Nordic literature. They are awarded by The American-Scandinavian Foundation annually for the finest translations of prose or poetry by Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, or Swedish authors born after 1800. For more information on the 2011 Translation Prize competition, please see the ASF’s website: www.amscan.org.
The American-Scandinavian Foundation is a publicly-supported, nonprofit institution founded in 1910 to promote international understanding through educational and cultural exchange between the United States and the five Nordic countries.