Congratulations to Andrew Shanks, who has been shortlisted for the Schlegel-Tieck Prize with Revelation Freshly Erupting by Nelly Sachs!

The Schlegel-Tieck Prize is an annual award run by The Society of Authors for translations into English of full length German works of literary merit and general interest. The winner is awarded £3,000 and a runner–up is awarded £1,000. This year’s judges are Gabriel Gbadamosi, Anju Okhandiar and Shaun Whiteside.

Judge Anju Okhandiar said of the shortlist, 'The genius of these books ranging from poetry to prose reveal the authors uncompromising imagination, linguistic variations maintaining subtlety and flawlessness of style and register.'

The winner will be announced at a ceremony at the British Library in London, and the full shortlist can be found here.

Well done to Andrew, and all the other shortlisted translators and publishers!

The Jewish poet Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) writes in direct response to the Holocaust. She is uniquely a 'prophetic' poet, one of the greatest of that species in the twentieth century.

Her first book appeared in the immediate wake of the Second World War, in 1946. Since that time, Hans Magnus Enzensberger declared, 'she has been writing fundamentally a single book'. That book is represented in this volume which reveals her whole progression rendered into English. Unlike earlier translators, Andrew Shanks calls his versions 'translations/imitations', moving away from the doggedly literal to render more faithfully the sense and intention of the originals.

Sachs escaped Berlin in May 1940. She found refuge in Sweden. Her major work is an evolving response to the trauma of the Holocaust. In 1966 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This book includes all the lyric poetry Sachs published in her lifetime and adds the posthumous collection Teile dich Nacht, an introductory essay, and notes.

Her poetry begins as a monumental lament for the victims of the Holocaust. Other themes develop: biblical, Kabbalist and religious allusions, personal bereavement, mental breakdown. And there are reflections on poetic vocation in the darkness of recent history.