Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, a PhD candidate in comparative literature in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for fiction for her translation of Can Xue’s “The Last Lover” (Yale University Press, 2014) from Chinese to English.
This was Wasmoen’s first book-length translation.
The Best Translated Book Awards were launched in 2007 by Three Percent, an online literary magazine at the University of Rochester. The BTBA aims to bring attention to the best original works of international fiction and poetry published in the United States during the previous year, which help make literature from other cultures available to American readers. For each award, both the book’s authors and its translators receive a $5,000 prize.
The BTBA, in announcing this year’s winners, said judges found the book “the most radical and uncompromising of this year’s finalists, pushing the novel form into bold new territory.”
“Annelise F. Wasmoen’s translation succeeds in crafting a powerful English voice for a writer of singular imagination and insight,” the judges found.