Translation award winner announced

ISTANBUL

The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) introduced an encouragement award in 2015 to support outstanding translations of literary works, including but not limited to poetry, short stories and novels from other languages to the Turkish language. 

The İKSV’s first award to date in the field of literature, the Talât Sait Halman Translation Award, found its recipient for the third time in 2017. The selection committee announced Fuat Sevimay as the winner, for his outstanding translation of the 1939 novel by James Joyce, Finnegans Wake.

The award had been evaluated by a selection committee headed by author Doğan Hızlan and composed of author, translator and critic Sevin Okyay, translator Ayşe Sarısayın, author and translator Yiğit Bener and author and translator Kaya Genç.

Sevimay won the award for his creativity, courage and playfulness in delivering sentences from Finnegans Wake, which opens up about the night and dreams, bringing together languages and histories in Turkish. The award is worth 15,000 Turkish Liras.

More than 50 works that were completed within 2016, including poems, short stories and novels translated from English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Persian, Japanese, Greek, Bulgarian, Chinese, Korean and Norwegian, applied for the award.